President John F Kennedy was murdered by Operation 40 - a CIA's assassination squad with the explicit mission of removing from power Fidel Castro and others unfriendly foreign leaders.
Operation 40 was the code name for a counter intelligence team, composed originally by forty Cuban exiles who were trained by David Sanchez Morales, to overthrow Fidel Castro's regime, and take control of the Cuban government after Fidel Castro elimination. Operation 40 was approved by President Dwight Eisenhower. On 17 March 1960, President Eisenhower signed a U.S. National Security Council directive on the anti-Cuban covert action program authorizing the CIA to organize, train, and equip Cuban refugees as a guerrilla force to overthrow the government of Cuban prime minister Fidel Castro.[citation needed]
The Special Group 40 - SG 40- was presided over by Richard Nixon, who was also the Officer Case Manager-, and included Admiral Arleigh Burke, Livingston Merchant of the State Department, National Security Adviser Gordon Gray, and Allen Dulles, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
The Special Group 40 assembled an experienced team of senior operative agents with a proven record in destabilizing and overthrowing foreign regimes, among them, the agents involved in the removal of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemalla: Tracey Barnes, Richard Bissell, David Sanchez Morales, David Atlee Phillips, E. Howard Hunt, Rip Robertson and Henry Hecksher, and agents involved in undercover operations in Germany: Ted Shackley, Tom Clines and William Harvey.
The Secret Committee Called '40' - The New York Times
Richard Nixon, the president of the secret Special 40 Ggroup , later renamed as 40 Committee (and its assassinatuin squad Operation 40) were in Dallas ready to change History by executing the President of United States John F. Kennedy
(Daniel Hopsicker, Mad Cow Morning News (24th August, 2004)
Based on this memorandum, Allen Dulles established Operation 40, presided over by Richard Nixon, and Tracy Barnes as the operating officer. The group was also called the Cuban Task Force. Tracy Barnes was chief of the CIA operations group against Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, The first meeting chaired by Tracy Barnes took place on January 11, 1960, and was attended by David Atlee Phillips, E. Howard Hunt, Jack Esterline, and Frank Bender.
On March 17, 1960, President Eisenhower signed a National Security Council directive on the anti-Cuban covert action program authorizing the CIA to organize, train, and equip Cuban refugees
to overthrow the government of Cuban prime minister Fidel Castro.
According to Frank Sturgid, one of its members, Operation 40 was not only involved in sabotage operations. Upon orders, Operation 40 woulf assassinate either members of the military or the political parties of the foreign country targeted, and if necessary some of our own members who were suspected of being foreign agents.
At the end of 1960, it was clear that Operation 40's goal of inciting civil war in Cuba against the government of Fidel Castro had failed, and Brigade 2506 was created, a CIA-sponsored group made up of 1,511 Cuban exiles who fought in the Bay of Pigs Invasion, on April 1961. Althobeen arguedugh, it hhas been argued that Opoeration 40 initial objective was to take control of the towns liberated by the invasion force, subdue government officials and sympathizers and seize the files of the different intelligence services" after the Bay of Pigs invasion.
Operation 40's field squadd, supposedly trained to remove Fidel Castro from power, was redirected by the Special 40 Group to kill president John F. Kennedy
David Atlee Phillips in the unpublished manuscript entitled The AMLASH Legacy, wrote: "I was one of those officers who handled Lee Harvey Oswald ... We gave him the mission of killing Fidel Castro in Cuba ... I don't know why he killed Kennedy. But I do know he used precisely the plan we had devised against Castro. Thus the CIA did not anticipate the president's assassination, but it was responsible for it. I share that guilt. "
On March 17, 1960, President Eisenhower signed a National Security Council directive that brought to life 40 Committee and Operation 40
488th Military Intelligence Detachment
The Dallas Police preparing for the visit of President Kennedy (English Version)
the "dark complected man", captured by the Zapruder film seated on the sidewalk with the Umbrella Man
Umbrella Man & Dark-Complected Man (English Version)
Orlando Bosch Avila
The Cuban exile Orlando Bosh Avila, "the dark complected man seen in Dealey PLaza, the walkie talke man seated by the Umbrella man, was the Chief of Action and Sabotage (Currently called Terrorism) of the Movement 26 of July in the province of Las Villas, Cuba, during Fidel Castro's guerilla war against General Fulgencio Batista.
Cuban exile Orlando Bosh Avila, the Walkie Talkie man, seated by the Umbrella Man in Dealey Plaza
Cuban exile Orlando Bosh Avila, wearing white shirt, signalling along the Umbrella man in Dealey Plaza
Orlando Bosch - Spartacus Educational
Orlando Bosh Avila, the walkie talkie man, seated by the Umbrella man is described as the dark complected man in Dealey Plaza, Orlando Bosh was the Chief of Action and Sabotage of Movement 26 of July in the province Las Villas, Cuba.The "umbrella man" was one of the closest bystanders to President John F. Kennedy when Kennedy was first struck by a bullet. As Kennedy's limousine approached, the man opened up and lifted the umbrella high above his head, then spun or panned the umbrella from east to west (clockwise) as the president passed by him. In the aftermath of the assassination, the "umbrella man" sat down on the sidewalk next to Orlando Bosh before getting up and walking towards the Texas School Book Depository.Assassination researchers Josiah Thompson and Richard Sprague suggested that the "umbrella man" may have been acting as a signaler of some kind, opening his umbrella to signal "go ahead" and then raising it to communicate "fire a second round" to other gunmen.
CIA Cryptonym: AMDITTO-23
https://www.maryferrell.org/php/cryptdb.php?id=AMDITTO-23
https://www.maryferrell.org/php/cryptdb.php?id=AMDITTO
In early Dec. 1963, a CIA cable refers to AMDITTO-8 and 9 as "infiltrees".
After the United States Secret Service received a tip of a plot to assassinate President Johnson during his two-day visit to Florida, "security measures rarely if ever seen in peacetime" were implemented to prevent the threat that a Cuban pilot on a suicide mission would attempt to crash an airplane into the President's Boeing 707 jet, Air Force One. Rather than flying into Miami on his official aircraft, the President landed at West Palm Beach, Florida on one of three "executive transport jets" operated by the U.S. Air Force, with two identical planes making the journey so it would not be clear which one he was on. Upon landing, he boarded a helicopter that had been stripped of "all markings that might have identified the craft" as a presidential vehicle, and flew the 67 miles to Miami, landing without prior notice to the press.
Dominick Bartone, a representative of Santos Trafficante, worked with Bosch and his group in 1963. Bartone also was helping out William Morgan with money at about the time of Morgan's arrest in 1960. Frank Sturgis Fiorini, the famous Watergate burglar, was working with Bosch during 1961. Frank suspected in 1962 he thought Bosch might be working with Castro at the time that Angus McNair and his colleagues were arrested.
February 24, 1961 CIA notes: MIRR is under the leadership of Orlando Bosch, a medical doctor and formerly active in the July 26 Movement. Victor Paneque, also known as Captain Diego, is considered the military leader and has access to a 45-foot motor launch called 'The Jolly Roger'. The military commander for its resistance group in the Escambray Mountains is Joaquin Membribo. MM T-4, in January, 1961, advised that Frank Anthony Sturgis, also known as Frank Fiorini has a group of about 70 individuals (in Miami) who want to obtain arms and ammunition for an attack against the Castro government of Cuba. Fiorini is negotiating with Paneque concerning unity of the two groups, and Paneque and Fiorini plan to establish a training camp for their men in the Florida Keys where military training will be afforded."
Interview with Secret Service agent Ernest Aragon is a 7 page document interview summary of Secret Service Agent Ernestino Ignacio Aragon , dated March 25, 1978. After the assassination, the Secret Service Aragon reported security lapses while his Miami boss John Marshall twice told the HSCA that It was possible that the Secret Service was involved in the killing of JFK. In late February, 1964, President Johnson was due to fly to Miami on Air Force One. The SS received information that Orlando Bosch was going to ram Air Force One and knock it out of the sky. "We had three planes similar to Air Force One fly down. The real one landed at Palm Beach and the Secret Service helicoptered Johnson to Miami, " he said. "This was the only time I recall helicopters being substituted," Aragon told me.
Orlando Bosch Avila had the CIA Cryptonym AMDITTO -23, the famous Cuban exile who led the MIRR, Insurrectional Movement for Revolutionary Recovery. The MIRR engaged in a number of raids directed at the sugar industry in Cuba during 1963 in an effort to disrupt the economy. Bosch was linked to a number of bombing attacks directed at Cuba, particularly during the 1960s and 1970s.
Other AMDITTOs were involved in infiltration of Cuba. AMDITTO wads acquitted twice and had a guilty verdict set aside in 3 cases, 2 involving bombs. Bosch's secretary was Augusto Valdez Miranda.
Gervelio Gutierrez, according to reliable experts, is the so-called 'bomb expert' of this group, and had the responsibility of making bombs and preparing them for use. Also known as Mimo, Gutierrez was the MIRR military coordinator. State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research stated that on October 10, 1976, 73 people were killed in a crash of a DC-8 Cubana airliner. "Venezuelan photographers Hernan Ricardo Lozano and Freddy Lugo were arrested by Trinidadian police on October 7 and accused of having planted a bomb on the Cuban aircraft. Venezuelan authorities detained two Cuban exiles, Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles, who allegedly masterminded the sabotage." Cuban exiles in Venezuela at this time numbered between 30,000 to 50,000. New Times article: "In the 11 months since the CORU meeting of 1976, Bosch boasts, CORU has been responsible for over 50 bombings in Miami, New York, Venezuela, Panama, Mexico and Argentina."
This work record identifies AMDITTO-23 as Bosch. Calvin Hicks was his case agent.
The United States House Select Committee on Assassinations, HSCA, gives a history of the MIRR and its general coordinator, Dr. Orlando Bosch Avila. Also mentions its military chief Victor Paneque. The author points out that Bosch's zealotry could have led him to a role in the assassination of president John F. Kennedy, adding that he is linked to the downing of the Cubana airliner in 1975 and other bombings in the 1960s and 70s. In 1963 the MIRR led a number of bombing attacks directed at the sugar industry in an effort to disrupt the economy. Further details can be found in this 1/18/61 FBI interview with Bosch.
Donald Freed, Death in Washington: The Murder of Orlando Letelier, claims that on 29th June, 1976, Townley had a gathering with Bernardo De Torres, Armando Lopez Estrada, Hector Duran and General Juan Manuel Contreras Sepulveda. The next month Frank Castro, Luis Posada, Orlando Bosch and Guillermo Novo set up Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations, CORU. CORU was incompletely financed by Guillermo Hernández Cartaya, another Bay of Pigs veteran firmly connected to the CIA. He was subsequently accused of tax evasion, medications and arms dealing and misappropriation. The bureaucratic examiner revealed to Pete Brewton that he had been approached by a CIA official who clarified that "Cartaya had done a lot of things that the public authority was obliged to him for, and he requested that I drop the charges against him."
One Miami police veteran told the authors of Assassination on Embassy Row, 1980: "The Cubans held the CORU meeting in line with the CIA. The Cuban gatherings were going crazy during the 1970s, and the United States had failed to keep a grip on them. So the United States sponsored the gathering to get them all rolling a similar way once more, under United States control.George H. W.Bush was director of the CIA when this gathering occurred.
November 3, 1961, contact report by Thomas C. Clines of meeting with Evelio Duque Miyar, Duque said that he and Bosch were ready to take out Castro in December, and that they could do it if the CIA supplied 15 men. Clines said we have no plans at this time to land troops "to deliver the final blow to Fidel". This is a month after General Charles Cabell writes a letter to Assstant Attorney gerneral Yeagley about Duque and Bosch and Joseph Cardoza's Neutrality Act violations, Cabell tells Yeagley that they plan to "use" Duque.
January , 1962 memo, Calvin Hicks to JM WAVE. Request a Power of Attorney on Orlando Bosch Avila to be used as external coordinator in Duque group.
Bosch's Power of Attorney began in March 1962. Originating officer is J. Moughan of TFW Ops Support. Albert C. Davies was Chief, TFW Intel.
From the Cuban Counterrevolutionary Handbook from late 1962. Entry for ECA: Ejercito Cubano Anti-Comunista - Anti-Communist Cuban Army...led by Evelio Duque Miyar and Orlando Busch Avila, author of violently anti-US, anti-CIA, anti-Miro pamphlet produced in Miami, August 1962). Found completely undependable by US contacts. Have small delegations in Miami, New Jersey, and Chicago, but never had anything in Cuba.
On June 23,1963, Bosch general coordinator of Duque's group claimed that Duque had neither the money or the equipment for a raidon Cuba. However, Duque met with Dominick Bartone of Trafficante's group on june 18/, 1963 to obtain high explosives and more for raid on Cuba. Bartone said he would be leaving for New Orleans, and would let Duque's people know where in New Orleans to pick up the equipment. Duque's representative was Luis Balbuena, who agreed to fly to NYC with Bartone's bodyguard and pick up the equipment. Balbuena got cold feet, fearing capture by the US government. There was a split in the group by October, 1963, with Duque claiming that Bosch was focused on raids on Cuba that were doomed to fail. Bosch went off to form a new group that fall.
Orlando Bosch reported planes from MIRR dropping a bomb on the Cunagua sugar mill on August 15, 1963, a missed attempt elsewhere on August 16, 1963; great damage to the Jaronu sugar refinery in Camaguey, with four bombs on September 8, 1963
Dduring President Kennedy's visit to Miami, Florida, on November 18, 1963, it was alleged that Felipe Rivero Diaz, head of the neofascist ANC, Cuban Nationalist Movement, and Orlando Bosch were cooperating in organizing demonstrations, and that Bosch urged the exiles to carry signs and shout. Bosch denied that he had a part in plans to picket the President." Bosch's address is revealed as 65 SW, 28th Road, Miami, and that Bosch was interested in radio transmitters and receivers to be used for communication between Cuba and his group in the United States. Herminio Diaz Garcia regarded Orlando Bosch as a "crazy man"
AMRUG-5, Victor Paneque Batista, aka by the aliases "Comandante Diego", "Rene", and "Ricardo". MIRR coordinator answering to AMDITTO-23, Orlando Bosch, during early sixties. Sent by his uncle, AMPALM-2, Laureano Batista, to set up the training camp in Lacombe, Louisiana in 1963.
December 1960: Bosch tells FBI that Paneque is the military coordinator for MIRR, which he heads. His armed group in Cuba has 700 to 1000 men fighting Castro. Paneque is planning to enter Cuba and engage in sabotage.
May 14, 1961, Jack Anderson interview with Frank Fiorini in Miami Herald: "I finally got fed up (with the other anti-Castro groups) and formed my own International Brigade, training in the Florida Everglades. In helping to set up an anti-Castro force inside Cuba, I collaborated with Victor Emmanuel Paneque, the legendary 'Diego' who directed the Havana underground for Castro. Diego is a short, stocky daredevil who wears a cigar in his mouth as a permanent article of dress. He fears nothing."
MIRR - Movimento Insurreccional de Recuperacion (Insurrectional Movement for Revolutionary Recovery). The exile group was led by Orlando Bosch.
Between December 1960 and March 1961, Frank Fiorini "reportedly was cooperating with the MIRR, headed by Orlando Bosch, and had attempted to negotiate agreements with Victor Paneque, aka Captain Diego, MIRR military coordinator, for unity of that organization with Fiorini's group. Paneque and Fiorini allegedly had participated in an unsuccessful attempt to invade Cuba, returning to the Miami area on February 26, 1961, indicated he would establish the International Brigade and that he planned to have Alexande) Rorke in charge of the New York office and Information Service of the brigade as a cover for an intelligence operation. Fiorini allegedly had a bad reputation among the Cuban nationals and was characterized as loud, obscene, immoral and as a braggart and as residing with one Janet Mann, a stripteaser and "B" girl."
September 18, 1962, dispatch from Chief, JM WAVE to Chief, Task Force W. Dr. Orlando Bosch Avila: Information from AMBASAL-1: "Orlando Bosch organized an anti-Castro organization called Movimento Insurreccional Revolucionario which later became Ejercito Cubano Anticomunista Frente Escambray. Orlando Bosch was the Secretary General of the latter organization, other top posts being held by Dr. Gonzalo Lage and Evilio Duque, 'the fighting Comandante' who lived in Spain for many years under the name Marcelino Garcia. Lage recently became disgusted with Orlando Bosch and left group..For a time, Orlando Bosch was involved in an organization called MIRR with which Frank Fiorini was also connected. The MIRR received $75,000 from 'Chiri' Mendosa, son of Mario Mendosa, the wealthy Cuban contractor, and sent a team to Pinar del Rio which included Angus McNair, an American, as receivers of supplies and equipment to be airdropped later. The team was compromised and all of its leaders were executed. Fiorini suspected that Orlando Bosch may have been in league with Castro's G-2 because the compromise of the team was well known but the drops went forward anyway. When Evilio Duque came out the Escambray to exile in Miami, Orlando osch was his constant companion. For a time, Orlando Bosch fell in with Victor Paneque, 'El Comandante Diego', but they parted company, and about two months ago, Orlando Bosch was known to be back with Duque."
Orlando Bosch was born on eighteenth August, 1926, in the town of Potrerillo, around 150 miles east of Havana, Bosch was the child of Miguel Ángel Bosch Cruz and Rosa Ávila Villalonga. His dad, a previous police officer, was an effective eatery proprietor. His mom was an instructor.
In 1946, he enrolled at the University of Havana. As an understudy he held liberal sentiments and joined Fidel Castro in the mission to eliminate Fulgencio Batista, the military despot in Cuba. As indicated by Bosch's collection of memoirs he had to escape to Miami in the last part of the 1950s on the grounds that Batista powers were going to capture him.
After Batista was crushed, Bosch got back to the island to help remake the country as an ally of the victorious Castro powers. Notwithstanding, Bosch before long got frustrated with the Castro government and he left the country in July 1960. After the Bay of Pigs. Bosch ran an enemy of Castro instructional course for the Central Intelligence Agency in Homestead, Florida. Bosch bit by bit became persuaded that the Cubans had been sold out by President John F. Kennedy and composed a flyer about this called The Tragedy of Cuba.
As per Marita Lorenz, Bosch becamed a member of Operation 40, a CIA death crew. One member, Frank Sturgis, guaranteed: "this death bunch (Operation 40) would upon orders, normally, kill either individuals from the military or the ideological groups of the outside country that you planned to invade, and if important your very own individuals who were associated with being unfamiliar specialists... We were concentratredr rigorously in Cuba at that specific time."
Lorenz brought up that a couple of days before the death of John F. Kennedy, a gathering including Bosch, Frank Sturgis, Guillermo Novo and Pedro Diaz Lanz, ventured out to Dallas. She likewise guaranteed that Bosch was at an inn in Dallas when Kennedy's homicide was arranged.
Bosch established the organization called "Poder Cubano" (Cuban Power) which he utilized as a methods for creating and carrying out his terror based battles all through the world. Orlando Bosch was associated with 78 psychological assaults on Spain, England, Japan, Mexico, Poland, and different countries that do business with Cuba
In February, 1968, Ricardo Morales Navarrete was captured and accused of putting an explosive gadget in the structure of an organization exchanging with Cuba. He was at last released on this charge and consented to turn into a FBI informer and went to work for Orlando Bosch.
In October, 1968, United States officials arrested Bosch for terrorist activities. Ricardo Morales Navarrete provided evidence against him and he was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Bosch was freed in 1972. The following year he moved to Venezuela where he joined up with Guillermo Novo and Luis Posada.
In October, 1968, United States authorities captured Bosch for fterrorism. Ricardo Morales Navarrete gave proof against him and he was condemned to 10 years in jail. Bosch was liberated in 1972. The next year he moved to Venezuela where he got together with Guillermo Novo and Luis Posada Carriles.
On 25th November 1975, heads the intelligence services of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay met, with Juan Manuel Contreras in Santiago de Chile. The primary goal was for the CIA to arrange the activities of the different security institutions in "suppresing Marxist subverion". OperationCondor was given secret endorsement by the United States which dreaded a Marxist transformation in the area. The objectives were formally radical guerrillas yet incorporated a wide range of political adversaries.Orlanbdo Bosch got associated with this secret activity.
on the plane. Ricardo claimed the bombing had been organized by Bosch and Luis Posada. When Posada was arrested he was found with a map of Washington showing the daily route of to work of Orlando Letelier, the former Chilean Foreign Minister, who had been assassinated on 21st September, 1976.
In October, 1976, the midair blast of Cubana Flight 455 flying out of Barbados murdered each of the 73 individuals on board, including the 24 youthful competitors for Cuba's gold-award fencing crew. Police in Trinidad captured two Venezuelans, Herman Ricardo and Freddy Lugo. Ricardo worked for Posada's security organization in Venezuela and conceded that he and Lugo had planted two bombs on the plane. Ricardo guaranteed that the action had been coordinated by BOrlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles. At the point when Posada was captured he was found with a guide of Washington showing the route of to work of Orlando Letelier, the previous Chilean Foreign Minister, who had been killed on 21st September, 1976.
Herman Ricardo and Freddy Lugo were both condemned to twenty years detainment. In 1987 Bosch was liberated. Bosch entered the United States, where he was allowed as refuge. He was in the long run exonerated by President George Bush on eighteenth July, 1990.
Bosch was met by Dollan Cannell for his narrative, 638 Ways to Kill Fidel Castro (2006). He was inquired as to whether he and the CIA were associated with the bombarding of Cubana Flight 455. Bosch answered that he was not permitted to discuss such matters. He was accordingly not ready to answer "yes" or "no". He at that point called attention to that he had been blamed for getting sorted out the setting of bombs on three Cuban planes. He at that point went onto to legitimize this activity by guaranteeing that all things considered he was an officer completing requests in a conflict against Fidel Castro.
Orlando Bosch passed away in Miami on 26th April, 2011.
Orlando Bosch - Wikipedia
Death of a Diplomat | The FBI Files
The Assassination of Orlando Letelier and Ronnie Moffitt
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQrajEfWZ1Y
Orlando Bosh Avila, "the dark complected man seen in Dealey PLaza, tis linked to the shutdown of Cubana de Aviación Flight 455 in October 6, 1976
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuQRpqGm8Uw
Cubana de Aviación Flight 455*October 6, 1976*Dangerous history symbolism till date.
Simply watch the Zapruder film. Greer was JFK's driver. Greer was trained to speed up and turn if the President was at serious risk, yet he did the exact inverse. 59 witnesses agree that Greer slowed down limousine after the ofirst shot was fired, and that Greer sped up after he looked back twice at the President and the last shots were shot.
"If the Secret Service men in the front had reacted quicker to the first two shots at the President's car, if the driver had stepped on the gas before instead of after the fatal third shot was fired, would President Kennedy be alive today? He added "Greer had been remorseful all day, feeling that he could have saved President Kennedy's life by swerving the car or speeding suddenly after the first shots."
On the 22nd November, 1963, Greer was given the task to drive presidential car in the motorcade through Dallas. A few observers said that Greer halted the vehicle after the initially shot was fired. This included Jean Hill, who was the nearest observer to the vehicle when Kennedy was hot: According to Hill "the motorcade came to right around a stop at the time the shots rang out". James Chaney (one of the four Presidential motorcyclists) - expressed that the limousine "after the shooting, from the time the initially shot rang out, the vehicle halted totally, pulled to one side and halted." Mary Woodward, a columnist with the Dallas Morning News stated: "Rather than accelerating the vehicle, the vehicle stopped... after the first shot".
William Greer was born in County Tyrone, Ireland, in 1910. His family emigrated to the United States. Greer filled in as a homestead worker prior to moving to Boston where he workeda s a driver. After the bombarding of Pearl Harbor Greer joined the US Navy. He was assigned to the presidential yacht in May 1944.
Toward the finish of the Second World War Greer joined the U.S. Secret Service. He joined the staff of the White House in November, 1950. Over the course of the following thirteen years he functioned as a driver for Harry S. Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and John F. Kennedy
Kenneth O'Donnell (special assistant to Kennedy), who was traveling in the motorcade, later confirmed: "If the Secret Service men in the front had reacted faster to the initial two shots at the President's car, if the driver had accelerated rather than after the lethal third shot was fired, would President Kennedy be alive today? He added "Greer had been contrite throughout the day, feeling that he might have saved President Kennedy's life by turning the vehicle or speeding out of nowhere after the principal shots. "
William Manchester assures that Greer communicated to Jackie Kennedy at Parkland Hospital: "Oh, Mrs. Kennedy, oh my God, oh my God. I didn't mean to do it, I didn't hear, I should have swerved the car , I couldn't help it. Oh, Mrs. Kennedy, as soon as I saw it I swerved. If only I'd seen it in time! "
Senator Ralph Yarborough, who was riding with Lyndon B. Johnson, was severely critical of Greer's reactions: "When the gunshot boom was heard, the motorcade practically stopped completely ... After the third shot was fired, but only after the third shot was fired, the cavalcade speeded up, gained speed rapidly, and roared away to the Parkland Hospital ... The cars all stopped ... 'I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings but for the protection of future Presidents , they (the Secret Service) should be trained to take off when a shot is fired. "
Around 59 witnesses and the Zapruder Film show that Greer stopped the president's limo when the first shot was fired. However, after being interviewed by the Warren Commission, Greer stated: "I heard this noise. And I thought that is what it was. And then I heard it again. And I glanced over my shoulder. And I saw Governor Connally like he was starting to fall. Then I realized there was something wrong. I tramped on the accelerator, and at the same time Mr. Kellerman said to me, "Get out of here fast." And I cannot remember even the other shots or noises that was. I cannot remember any more. I did not see anything happen behind me any more, because I was occupied with getting away. "
Greer testified that he heard three shots, all coming from behind him. His statement on Kennedy's head wound suggested that there was a conspiracy. He alleged that when he got to Parkland Hospital he saw Kennedy's "head was all shot, this whole part was all a matter of blood ... it looked like that was all blown off." This contradicts the images s of Kennedy's head that were published after his death.
Apparently, Greer suspected that John F. Kennedy had been a victim of a conspiracy. The daughter of Roy Kellerman, the Secret Agent in Kennedy's car, told Harold Weisberg in the 1970's that "I hope the day will come when these men (Kellerman and Greer) will be able to say what they've told their families".
Before JFK was to arrive in Chicago, the Secret Service got a tip that a four right-wing snipers were planning to kill the President on a slow stretch of the road as he was riding on his motorcade into the Chicago Loop. William Greer had been tasked to be JFK’s limousine driver; Greer would receive the same assignment three weeks later in Dallas. One of the agents who heard the news was the first African American Secret Service agent to serve at the White House Detail - Abraham Bolden. Bolden would pay dearly for his knowledge of him.
Just look at the Zapruder film. Greer was JFK’s driver. Greer was trained to accelerate and swerve if the President was in danger, but he did just the opposite. The consensus of 59 witnesses indicates that Greer slowed down the limousine after the first shot was fired, and that Greer accelerated after he looked back twice at the President and the last shots were fired.
Kellerman and Greer told some people that the shooter was a lone gunman, while telling others that there was “more to the assassination than what was officially pronounced”. Kellerman insisted to the Warren Commission that there were more than three shots, and theny changed his story from him and explained that there were only three shots.
Kellerman and Greer parked themselves right in the middle of the autopsy room, where the pathologists on the scene were intimidated into conducting what has been called a controlled autopsy. Who was leaning on the pathologists James Humes, Thornton Boswell, and Pierre Finck? Kellerman himself? Other Secret Service agents? The FBI? Or the doctors’ superiors? And was it planned before the assassination, rather than an after-the-fact reaction?
Elmer Moore of the White House Secret Service detail admitted to a researcher that it was a shame that Jack Kennedy had died, but that he was a “traitor” for giving things away to the Russians. Moore also admitted that he was the one who had badgered Dr. Malcolm Perry into changing his testimony to say that there was no entrance wound in the front of the President’s neck. A 1963 news headline affirmed that “After Visit by Agents, Doctors Say Shot was from Rear”. Four other agents expressed “dismay” over Kennedy’s dalliances with women, which they were often forced to cover up. Kellerman, Greer, and their colleagues have earned withering scrutiny.
Primary Sources
(1) William Manchester, The Death of a President (1967)
There was a sudden, sharp, shattering sound. Various individuals heard it differently. Jacqueline Kennedy believed it was a motorcycle noise. Curry was under the impression that someone had fired a railroad torpedo. Ronald Fischer and Bob Edwards, assuming that it was a backfire, chuckled. Most of the hunters in the motorcade - Sorrels, Connally, Yarborough, Gonzalez, Albert Thomas - instinctively identified it as rifle fire.
But the White House Detail was confused. Their experience in outdoor shooting was limited to two qualification courses a year on a range in Washington's National Arboretum. There they heard only their own weapons, and they were unaccustomed to the bizarre effects that are created when small-arms fire echoes among unfamiliar structures - in this case, the buildings of Dealey Plaza. Emory Roberts recognized Oswald's first shot as a shot. So did Youngblood, whose alert response may have saved Lyndon Johnson's life. They were exceptions. The men in Halfback were bewildered. They glanced around uncertainly. Lawson, Kellerman, Greer, Ready, and Hill all thought that a firecracker had been exploded. The fact that this was a common reaction is no mitigation. It was the responsibility of James J. Rowley, Chief of the Secret Service, and Jerry Behn, Head of the White House Detail, to see that their agents were trained to cope with precisely this sort of emergency. They were supposed to be picked men, honed to a matchless edge. It was comprehensible that Roy Truly should dismiss the first shot as a cherry bomb. It was even fathomable that Patrolman James M. Chaney, mounted on a motorcycle six feet from the Lincoln, should think that another machine had backfired. Chaney was an ordinary policeman, not a Presidential bodyguard. The protection of the Chief Executive, on the other hand, was the profession of Secret Service agents. They existed for no other reason. Apart from Clint Hill - and perhaps Jack Ready, who started to step off the right running board and was ordered back by Roberts - the behaviour of the men in the follow-up car was unresponsive. Even more tragic was the perplexity of Roy Kellerman, the ranking agent in Dallas, and Bill Greer, who was under Kellerman's supervision. Kellerman and Greer were in a position to take swift evasive action, and for five terrible seconds they were immobilized.
(2) William Greer interviewed by Arlen Specter on behalf of the Warren Commission (9th March, 1964)
Arlen Specter: After turning off Main onto Houston, did you have any opportunity to take a look at the building which you have since identified as the Texas School Book Depository Building?
William Greer: No, sir. I had not any chance to look much at that building at all. When I made the turn into Elm Street, I was watching the overpass expressway - the overpass, or what was ahead of me. I always look at any - where I go underneath anything, I always watch above, so if there is anyone up there that I can move so that I won't go over the top of anyone, if they are unidentified to me, unless it is a policeman or something like that. We try to avoid going under them...
Arlen Specter: And as you turned onto Elm Street, how far, to the best of your ability to estimate, was your automobile from the overpass which you have just described?
William Greer: I wouldn't have a distance recollection at all on how far it was. It wasn't too far. I just could not give you the distance.
Arlen Specter: At that time, did you make a conscious effort to observe what was present, if anything, on that overpass?
William Greer: Yes, sir. I was making sure that I could not see anyone that might be standing there, and I didn't see anything that I was afraid of on the overpass.
Arlen Specter: Did you see anything at all on the overpass?
William Greer: Not that I can now remember.
Arlen Specter: What is your best recollection of the speed at which you were traveling as you turned left off of Houston onto Elm?
William Greer: My best recollection would be between 12 and 15 miles per hour.
Arlen Specter: And how far were you at that time behind the police car which was in front of you?
William Greer: Probably 50 feet maybe approximately. I will say approximately 50 feet.
Arlen Specter: As you turned onto Elm, did you have any opportunity to observe how far behind you the President's follow-up car was?
William Greer: No, sir. I was not looking in my mirror; I could not say how far it was behind me at the time.
Arlen Specter: And what was the nature of the crowd as you made the turn onto Elm Street, if you recall?
William Greer: To the best of my memory, the crowd had thinned out a great deal, and there was not too many people in front of that building... When we were going down Elm Street, I heard a noise that I thought was a backfire of one of the motorcycle policemen. And I didn't - it did not affect me like anything else. I just thought that it is what it was. We had had so many motorcycles around us. So I heard this noise. And I thought that is what it was. And then I heard it again. And I glanced over my shoulder. And I saw Governor Connally like he was starting to fall. Then I realized there was something wrong. I tramped on the accelerator, and at the same time Mr. Kellerman said to me, "Get out of here fast." And I cannot remember even the other shots or noises that was. I cannot quite remember any more. I did not see anything happen behind me any more, because I was occupied with getting away.
Arlen Specter: Now, how many shots, or how many noises have you just described that you heard?
William Greer: I know there was three that I heard - three. But I cannot remember any more than probably three. I know there was three anyway that I heard.
Arlen Specter: Do you have an independent recollection at this moment of having heard three shots at that time?
William Greer: I knew that after I heard the second one, that is when I looked over my shoulder, and I was conscious that there was something wrong, because that is when I saw Governor Connally. And when I turned around again, to the best of my recollection there was another one, right immediately after.
Arlen Specter: To the best of your ability to recollect and estimate, how much time elapsed from the first noise which you have described as being similar to the backfire of a motor vehicle until you heard the second noise?
William Greer: It seems a matter of seconds, I really couldn't say. Three or four seconds.
Arlen Specter: How much time elapsed, to the best of your ability to estimate and recollect, between the time of the second noise and the time of the third noise?
William Greer: The last two seemed to be just simultaneously, one behind the other, but I don't recollect just how much, how many seconds were between the two. I couldn't really say.
Arlen Specter: Describe as best you can the types of sound of the second report, as distinguished from the first noise which you said was similar to a motorcycle backfire?
William Greer: The second one didn't sound any different much than the first one but I kind of got, by turning around, I don't know whether I got a little concussion of it, maybe when it hit something or not, I may have gotten a little concussion that made me think there was something different to it. But so far as the noise is concerned, I haven't got any memory of any difference in them at all...
Arlen Specter: Did you step on the accelerator before, simultaneously or after Mr. Kellerman instructed you to accelerate?
William Greer: It was about simultaneously.
Arlen Specter: So that it was your reaction to accelerate prior to the time...
William Greer: Yes, sir.
Arlen Specter: You had gotten that instruction?
William Greer: Yes, sir; it was my reaction that caused me to accelerate.
Arlen Specter: Do you recollect whether you accelerated before or at the same time or after the third shot?
William Greer: I couldn't really say. Just as soon as I turned my head back from the second shot, right away I accelerated right then. It was a matter of my reflexes to the accelerator.
Arlen Specter: Was it at about that time that you heard the third shot?
William Greer: Yes, sir; just as soon as I turned my head.
Arlen Specter: What is your best estimate of the speed of the car at the time of the first, second, or third shots?
William Greer: I would estimate my speed was between 12 and 15 miles per hour.
(3) William Greer interviewed by Arlen Specter and Thomas H. Boggs on behalf of the Warren Commission (9th March, 1964)
Arlen Specter: I hand you Commission Exhibit 350 and ask you if you are able to state what that depicts?
William Greer: That depicts a break or a shatter in the windshield of it.
Arlen Specter: Does that picture accurately represent the status of the windshield on the President's car at sometime?
William Greer: Yes, sir; that windshield looks real familiar to me on the way it...
Arlen Specter: At what time, based on your observation, did the windshield of the President's car look like that picture?
William Greer: I had never seen that until the following day after it came back from Dallas.
Arlen Specter: But on November 23, did the President's car windshield look like that?
William Greer: Yes, sir; it looked like there was a break that had a diamond, in the windshield whenever I was shown that at the garage, the White House garage.
Arlen Specter: Was the size and scope of the crack the same as that which is shown on that exhibit?
William Greer: That I wouldn't remember whether it was quite that large or not. I don't believe it was that big. It might not have been but I wouldn't say for sure.
Arlen Specter: Did you observe any crack on the windshield after the time of the shooting on November 22?
William Greer: No, sir; I didn't see it at all. I didn't know anything about it until I came back, until the car came back and I was shown that.
Arlen Specter: Did you have any occasion on November 22, after the shooting, to observe closely the windshield?
William Greer: No, sir. The only time I was in the car was going to the hospital and I never - I didn't see the car any more. It was just from the shooting until we got to Parkland that I was with the car. I left the car there and never did see it until it was back at the White House garage.
Arlen Specter: Are you able to state with certainty there was no crack in that windshield prior to the shooting on November 22?
William Greer: Yes, sir; I am sure there was nothing wrong with that windshield prior to that because I would have it was almost in front of me and I examined the car, I looked it all over when I got there, I saw it was clean and everything, the windshield. I didn't see this ever at any time previous...
Arlen Specter: Give me your best estimate on the diameter of the cracking of the windshield as it existed on November 23?
William Greer: To the best of my estimate it would be these little stars that are here, the little shatters that are here.
Arlen Specter: Would it be fair to say that you are indicating a circle with a circumference or diameter of approximately an inch to an inch and a half?
William Greer: I don't think - it probably would be an inch. The whole diameter.
Arlen Specter: Approximately 1 inch as you estimate it?
William Greer: Yes, sir.
Thomas Boggs: Excuse me, did you say you did not notice this crack from the time that you drove the car after the shooting to the hospital?
William Greer: No, sir; I had flags on the car and you know they were waving at a high rate of speed and you have the Presidential flag and the American flag in front of you there; you know when you are going at a fast speed you get a lot of, well, I don't know how you would say it, it attracts you so much that I didn't have any recollection of what happened on the windshield.
Thomas Boggs: There was no glass or anything that spattered on you in any way?
William Greer: I was kind of shocked at the time, I guess anything could have and I wouldn't have known what hit me. You are tense, I was pretty tense, and naturally my thoughts were the hospital, and how fast I could get there, and probably I could have been injured and not even known I was injured. I was in that position.
(4) William Greer interviewed by Arlen Specter on behalf of the Warren Commission (9th March, 1964)
Arlen Specter: What did you observe with respect to President Kennedy's condition on arrival at the Parkland Hospital?
William Greer: To the best of my knowledge he was laying, it seemed across Mrs. Kennedy, looked like laying across her lap or in front of her, I am not too sure which, I opened the doors - the doors were opened before I got to it, someone else had opened the doors and they were trying to get Connally out, and Mrs. Connally out of the seats so they could get to the President.
Arlen Specter: What did you observe about the President with respect to his wounds?
William Greer: His head was all shot, this whole part was all a matter of blood like he had been hit.
Arlen Specter: Indicating the top and right rear side of the head?
William Greer: Yes, sir; it looked like that was all blown off.
Arlen Specter: Yes.
William Greer: . I run around the front of the car and got hold of a stretcher or thing and I got hold of it to keep it steady while they lifted the President's body onto it and then I helped pull the front end of it into the emergency room.
Arlen Specter: Who was first removed from the automobile?
William Greer: Governor Connally was first removed. He was on the jump seats.
Arlen Specter: And what, if anything, did you observe as to Governor Connally's condition on arrival at Parkland Hospital?
William Greer: The best of my recollection he was lying across the seat toward Mrs. Connally when they picked him up and got him out of the car. And he was rushed in first into the hospital. That is when I got the stretcher to bring it, to hold it until they would get the President on it, on the right side of the car. They took him out on the side he was sitting on, that side of the car.
Arlen Specter: Were you able to make any personal observation about Governor Connally's specific wound?
William Greer: No, sir. I didn't know how badly anyone really was injured. I had great thoughts the President was still living and that was the only thing I was thinking about was to get them in quick.
Arlen Specter: Going back to the shots themselves, Mr. Greer, do you have any reaction as to the direction from which the shots came?
William Greer: They sounded like they were behind me, to the right rear of me.
Arlen Specter: Would that be as to all three shots?
William Greer: Yes, sir. They sounded, everything sounded, behind me, to me. That was my thought, train of thought, that they were behind me.
Arlen Specter: Have you ever had any reaction or thought at any time since the assassination that the shots came from the front of the car?
William Greer: . No, sir; I had never even the least thought that they could come. There was no thought in my mind other than that they were behind me.
(5) Michael L. Kurtz, Crime of the Century: The Kennedy Assassination From a Historians Perspective (1982)
The Zapruder and other films and photographs of the assassination clearly reveal the utter lack of response by Secret Service agents Roy Kellerman and James Greer, who were in the front seat of the presidential limousine. After the first two shots, Greer actually slowed the vehicle to less than five miles an hour. Kellerman merely sat in the front seat, seemingly oblivious to the shooting. In contrast, Secret Service Agent Rufus Youngblood responded instantly to the first shot, and before the head shots were fired, had covered Vice-President Lyndon Johnson with his body.
Trained to react instantaneously, as in the attempted assassinations of President Gerald Ford by Lynette Fromme and Sara Jane Moore and of President Ronald Reagan by JohnWarnock Hinckley, the Secret Service agents assigned to protect President Kennedy simply neglected their duty. The reason for their neglect remains one of the more intriguing mysteries of the assassination.
(6) Judyth Baker, Deadly Alliance (1999)
Lee (Harvey Oswald) told me that the driver’s habits (William Greer) had been studied, and a shot going off would cause him to brake, which would slow the vehicle down. This was desired because even this cabal feared Aristotle Onassis, who would send killers out to track down anyone who killed Jackie Kennedy, or so the rumor went – and besides, everybody liked Jackie and orders were out not to hit her. It was to spare Jackie that some very expert marksmen missed or delayed their shots that day in Dealey Plaza: she was in their line of sight a great deal of the time, according to David Ferrie, who got the report from Marcello's henchmen as soon as he arrived in the Houston area.
(7) House Select Committee on Assassinations (1979)
Findings of the Select Committee on Assassinations in the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, November 22, 1963.
The committee believes, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy. The committee is unable to identify the other gunman or the extent of the conspiracy....
Agencies and departments of the U.S. Government performed with varying degrees of competency in the fulfillment of their duties. President John F. Kennedy did not receive adequate protection. A thorough and reliable investigation into the responsibility of Lee Harvey Oswald for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy was conducted. The investigation into the possibility of conspiracy in the assassination was inadequate. The conclusions of the investigations were arrived at in good faith, but presented in a fashion that was too definitive.
The Secret Service was deficient in the performance of its duties.
The Secret Service possessed information that was not properly analyzed, investigated or used by the Secret Service in connection with the President's trip to Dallas; in addition, Secret Service agents in the motorcade were inadequately prepared to protect the President from a sniper.
https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKpaine.htm
Craig saw the man again in the office of Captain Will Fitz. It was the recently arrested Lee Harvey Oswald. When Craig told his story about the man being picked up by the station wagon, Oswald replied: "That station wagon belongs to Mrs. Paine... Don't try to tie her into this. She had nothing to do with it."
Ruth Hyde Paine, the owner of the Nash station wagon, befriended Marina Oswald and Lee Harvey Oswald at the request of George de Mohrenschildt Ruth Paine helped Lee Harvey Oswald to get a job at the Texas School Book Depository.
According to five government investigations, Lee Harvey Oswald stored the 6.5 mm caliber Carcano rifle that he used to assassinate U.S. President John F. Kennedy, in Ruth Paine's garage, unbeknownst to her and her husband, Michael Paine.
Ruth Paine met the Oswalds through her interest in Russian. A friend from a singing group, Everett Glover, invited her to a party on February 22, 1963. The party was arranged by Oswald's friend, 51-year-old Russian émigré George de Mohrenschildt, a well-educated petroleum geologist with intelligence connections.The Paines and Oswalds spent much time together after the party.
Lee Harvey Oswald stayed at Ruth Paine home with Marina and his children, unannounced, on Thursday night, November 21, 1963, the night before President Kennedy was assassinated. When Oswald left for work on the morning of November 22, he brought a large package that he had kept in the Paine's garage with him, to work at the Texas School Book Depository. Oswald's coworker and friend, Wesley Frazier testified that Oswald told him the bag contained curtain rods. The evidence demonstrated that the package actually contained the rifle used by Oswald in the assassination.
In February, 1963 George de Mohrenschildt introduced Marina Oswald and Lee Harvey Oswald to Ruth Paine. On 24th April, 1963, Marina and her daughter went to live with Paine. Oswald rented a room in Dallas but stored some of his possessions in Ruth Paine’s garage. Ruth also helped Oswald to get a job at the Texas School Book Depository.
Over the next few months George de Mohrenschildt took Oswald to anti-Castro meetings in Dallas. De Mohrenschildt later told Edward Jay Epstein that he was asked by J Walton Moore to find out about Oswald's time in the Soviet Union. In return he was given help with an oil deal he was negotiating with Papa Doc Duvalier, the Haitian dictator. In March 1963, De Mohrenschildt got the contract from the Haitian government. He had assumed that this was because of the help he had given to the CIA
According to Gregory Burnham, George de Mohrenschildt was an "active member of 2 CIA Proprietary Organizations: The Dallas Council On World Affairs, and The Crusade For A Free Europe." Other members included Abraham Zapruder, Clint Murchison, David Byrd, George H W Bush, Neil Mallon and Haroldson L Hunt.
In 1957 George de Mohrenschildt met J. Walton Moore, the local CIA man in Dallas. According to Russ Baker, the two men had several meetings over the next few years. During this period, he worked for a company called Cuban-Venezuelan Oil Voting Trust Company (CVOVT), that had been established by William Buckley Sr. During this period, he got to know Jack Alston Crichton, who was one of several oil men who began negotiating with Fulgencio Batista, the military dictator of Cuba. Crichton later remarked that "I liked George. He was a nice guy."
Colonel Jack Alston Crichton was a founder members of CIA Operation 40, a CIA's Asassination Squad, whose members were mostly Cuban exiles.
In 1956, Jack Alston Crichton started up his own spy unit, the 488th Military Intelligence Detachment. Crichton served as the unit's commander, under Lieutenant Colonel George Whitmeyer, who was in overall command of all Army Reserve units in East Texas. In an interview Crichton claimed that there were "about a hundred men in that unit, and about forty or fifty of them, were from the Dallas Police Department.
Jack Alston Crichton was so plugged into the Dallas power structure, that one of his company directors was Clint Murchison Sr, king of the oil depletion allowance, and another was D Harold Byrd, owner of the Texas School Book Depository building.
In November 1963, Jack Alston Crichton was involved in the arrangements of the visit that President John F Kennedy made to Dallas. His close friend, Deputy Police Chief George L Lumpkin, and a fellow member of the the 488th Military Intelligence Detachment, drove the pilot car of Kennedy's motorcade. Also, in the car was Lieutenant Colonel George Whitmeyer, commander of all Army Reserve units in East Texas. The pilot car stopped briefly in front of the Texas School Book Depository, where Lumpkin spoke to a policeman controlling traffic at the corner of Houston and Elm. As Russ Baker points out in Family of Secrets, 2008, Crichton served as the "intelligence unit's only commander, until he retired from the 488th in 1967".
Officer from Dallas Police Department participated in the assassination of President John f Kennedy, but as members of the 488th Military Intelligence Detachment, led by Colonel Jack Alston Crichton, a leading member of CIA Operation 40.
In 1961, George de Mohrenschildt was invited to lunch by J. Walton Moore. According to Edward Jay Epstein, during the meeting Moore told de Mohrenschildt about Lee Harvey Oswald living in Minsk. However, in his book on the case, I'm a Patsy, 1977, he gives a different version of events: "Early in the summer of 1962, the rumors spread out among the Russian-speaking people of Dallas and Fort Worth, of an unusual couple-the Oswalds. He was supposedly an ex-marine, an unfriendly and eccentric character, who had gone to Russia and brought back with him a Russian wife. He had lived in Minsk where I had spent my early childhood. And so I was curious to meet the couple, and to find out what had happened to Minsk. Someone gave me Lee's address, and one afternoon a friend of mine, Colonel Lawrence Orloff and I, drove to Fort Worth, about 30 miles from Dallas."
https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKcraigR.htm
David Belin: Now, about how many minutes was this after the time that you had turned that young couple over to Lemmy Lewis that you heard this whistle?
Roger Craig: Fourteen or 15 minutes.
David Belin: Was this, you mean, after the shooting?
Roger Craig: After the... from the time I heard the first shot.
David Belin: All right. Your heard someone whistle?
Roger Craig: Yes. So I turned and saw a man start to run down the hill on the north side of Elm Street, running down toward Elm Street.
David Belin: And, about where was he with relation to the School Book Depository Building?
Roger Craig: Directly across that little side street that runs in front of it, He was on the south side of it...
David Belin: And where was he with relation to the west side of the School Book Depository Building?
Roger Craig: Right by the... well, actually, directly in line with the west corner... the southwest corner,
David Belin: He was directly in line with the southwest corner of the building?
Roger Craig: Yes.
David Belin: And he was on the south curve of that street that runs right in front of the building there?
Roger Craig: Yes.
David Belin: And he started to run toward Elm Street as it curves under the underpass?
Roger Craig: Yes ; directly down the grassy portion of the park.
David Belin: All right. And then what did you see happen?
Roger Craig: I saw a light-colored station wagon, driving real slow, coming west on Elm Street from Houston... actually, it was nearly in line with him. And the driver was leaning to his right looking up the hill at the man running down.... And the station wagon stopped almost directly across from me. And... the man continued down the hill and got in the station wagon. And I attempted to cross the street. I wanted to talk to both of them. But the... traffic was so heavy I couldn't get across the street. And hey were gone before I could...
David Belin: Could you describe the man that you saw running down toward the station wagon?
Roger Craig: Oh, he was a white male in his twenties, five nine, five eight, something like that; about 140 to 150; had kind of medium brown sandy hair... you know, it was like it'd been blown... you know, he'd been in the wind or something-- it was all wild-looking; had on blue trousers...
David Belin: What shade of blue? Dark blue, medium or light?
Roger Craig: No; medium, probably; I'd say medium. And, a light tan shirt, as I remember it.
David Belin: Anything else about him?
Roger Craig: No; nothing except that he looked like he was in an awful hurry.
David Belin: What about the man who was driving the car?
Roger Craig: Now, he struck me, at first, as being a colored male. He was very dark and had real dark short hair, and was wearing a thin white-looking jacket, it looked like the short windbreaker type, you know, because it was real thin and had the collar that came out over the shoulder (indicating with hands) like that... just a short jacket.
David Belin: You say that he first struck you that way. Do you now think that he was a Negro?
Roger Craig: Well, I don't... I didn't get a real good look at him. But my first glance at him... I was more interested in the man coming down the hill... but my first glance at him, he struck me as a Negro...
https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKecker.htm
But never mind the unique insecurity, the route, and the behavior of the Secret Service. Nothing else looks suspicious, till after that slow turn onto Elm Street. Imagine this. There's a man, on this bright sunny day, standing on the sidewalk right where the President is about to pass, who opens an umbrella. Not only that, but (as seen in the Zapruder film) he rotates the open umbrella while he's standing under it, as if somehow tracking the President with it as the limo approaches. Now the man pumps the umbrella up and down, as if signaling, right after JFK is first shot. Not only that, but there's a slim, dark-complected man standing on the sidewalk near the umbrella man who, after JFK has been hit, raises one hand high in the air. And after more shots have been fired, fatally wounding the President, and while everyone else is running about or fearfully lying low on the plaza grass, the man with the umbrella calmly lowers and closes it. Then he and the dark-complected man, with chaos all around them, casually sit down together on the curb. The dark-complected man apparently says something into a radio, then conceals it in his back when he and the umbrella man, having taken
)Ron Ecker, The Tokyo Flight (October, 2004)
https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKecker.htm
When President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963, six members of his Cabinet plus his press secretary were out of the country, together on an airplane en route to Tokyo, Japan. Some JFK conspiracy theorists have seen this group absence of key government officials from Washington during the assassination as more than a coincidence.
"We believe it was by design," J. Gary Shaw writes in his book Cover-Up, "that Secretary of State (Dean) Rusk, Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon, Interior Secretary Stewart Udall and Labor Secretary W.W. Wirtz, as well as other administration officials like Press Secretary (Pierre) Salinger, were trapped in an airplane over the Pacific Ocean at such a critical time." 1 (The other two Cabinet members aboard were Secretary of Commerce Luther Hodges and Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman. Cabinet members not on the trip were Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, HEW Secretary Anthony Celebrezze, and Postmaster General John Gronouski.)
Shaw also writes of a problem the Rusk party had in communicating by radio with the White House because "the official code book was missing from its special place aboard the plane" (italics in original), a suspicious circumstance reiterated by Robert Groden and Harrison Livingstone in their best-selling book High Treason.
The late Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty, who in 1963 was Chief of Special Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff (and who was the basis for the military character "X" in the Oliver Stone film JFK), was also out of the country that day, having been sent on a mission to the South Pole. In his 1992 book JFK, Prouty wonders, "Were there things that I knew, or would have discovered, that made it wise to have me far from Washington, along with others, such as the Kennedy cabinet . . . ?"
The Secret Committee Called '40' - The New York Times
Although the members of Operation 40 were CIA agents, the orders and missions they carried out did not come from the CIA but from the 40 Committee, though it should be noted that the Director of the CIA is a member of the 40 Committee.
Operation 40 members who pulled the triggers felt JFK was a traitor, ater the Bay of Pigs invasion, and wanted to kill him. They were used by the 40 Committee that wanted and took the decission of killing JFK for other reasons.
The 40 Committee had to operate outside the reach of Congress because they were going to engage in crimes, since their obsession and priority were "domestic traitors" such as President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert Kennedy, Rev. Martin Luther King. and John Lennon.
chronology of the 40 committee - CIA
Gordon Gray , National Security Advisor
(November 23, 1903 – May 15, 1976) He twice served as United States ambassador to Canada and was Under Secretary for Political Affairs from 1959 to 1961
John J. McCloy was the Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, and was a member of the Warren Commission to investigate the assassination of President Kennedy
"Rumours began to circulate that Murchison might have been involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. A friend of Murchison, Madeleine Brown, claimed in an interview on the television show, A Current Affair that on the 21st November, 1963, she was at his home in Dallas. Others at the meeting included Haroldson L. Hunt, J. Edgar Hoover, Clyde Tolson, John J. McCloy and Richard Nixon. At the end of the evening Lyndon B. Johnson arrived. Brown said in this interview: "Tension filled the room upon his arrival. The group immediately went behind closed doors. A short time later Lyndon, anxious and red-faced, reappeared. I knew how secretly Lyndon operated. Therefore I said nothing... not even that I was happy to see him. Squeezing my hand so hard, it felt crushed from the pressure, he spoke with a grating whisper, a quiet growl, into my ear, not a love message, but one I'll always remember: "After tomorrow those goddamn Kennedys will never embarrass me again - that's no threat - that's a promise."
At 9.40 pm on the night of 15 February 1898 the United States battleship Maine, riding quietly at anchor in Havana harbour, was suddenly blown up, in an explosion which tore her bottom out and sank her, killing 260 officers and men on board. In the morning, only twisted parts of the huge warship’s superstructure could be seen protruding above the water
An official U.S. Naval Court of Inquiry ruled that the ship was blown up by a mine.
The sinking of Maine led to the outbreak of the Spanish-American War in April 1898. Within three months, the United States had decisively defeated Spanish forces and in August an armistice halted the fighting. On December 12, 1898, the Treaty of Paris was signed between the United States and Spain, officially ending the Spanish-American War and granting the United States its first overseas empire with the ceding of such former Spanish possessions as Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines.
Wiretapping in Mexico City, Double Agents, and the Framing of Lee Oswald Chapter 3: The Cuban Compound in Mexico City Was Ground Zero
Emilio Santana - AMLEPTON operative in 1963 - "FBI report says Santana was alleged to own a Mannlicher-Carcano like Oswald's and to have been in Dealey Plaza at time of assassination on orders of the alleged consprirators (Shaw, Oswald, David Ferrie, and Sergio Arcacha Smith). During June 1964 listed CIA as employer in loan application for car purchase)."
https://www.maryferrell.org/php/cryptdb.php?id=AMLEPTON
1961-1962: Major Raul Jaime Arguelles Garcia
Major Raul Jaime Arguelles Garcia (201-269882) reported to the CIA through Havana. REDACTED reference to TFW (a strictly 1962 organization) believed to be in complete charge of Emilio Aragones and Aldo Margolles and their plan to kill JFK. Responsible for assassinations in the Batista regime, ran with gangsters and narcotics. 2/10/77, Latin American Division, review by Chris Hopkins. This report is based largely from SS officer Ernest Aragon's report from the 1961-1962 period:
A homage was paid on Thursday in Luanda by the Cuban Embassy to the Cuban internationalist,Raúl Jaime Díaz Argüelles (photo – left, with Amilcar Cabral), who fell 39 years ago on Angolan soil. The homage consisted in the laying of a wreath by the tomb keeping Raúl Jaime Díaz Arguelles’s remains at “Alto das Cruzes” cemetery. gisela garcia 8The wreath was laid by the Cuban ambassador to Angola, Gisela Garcia Rivera (photo below), in the presence of the Angolan minister of Ex-Combatants and Veterans of the Motherland, Cândido Pereira dos Santos Van-dúnem. Also attending the ceremony were Cuban embassy officials and representatives of Cuban companies operating in the country, including members of the Cuban community based in Angola.
https://youthandeldersja.wordpress.com/tag/raul-jaime-diaz-arguelles/
http://maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=18162&search=%22RAUL_DIAZ%22#relPageId=4&tab=page
104-10071-10227: DISPATCH: PROGRESS REPORT FOR SEPTEMBER, 1963
10/22/63 dispatch re Sept 63 AMLEPTON progress report. "Sixteen reports on persons or Subjects of KUDESK (CI Branch) and general Station interest were submitted during the reporting period." These included Herminio Diaz Garcia, Rolando Masferrer, and Victor J. Gutierrez, among others.
104-10013-10387: GARRISON AND THE KENNEDY ASSASSINATION
1960-1963: "(Santana) was recruited by JMWAVE in December 1960 as a guide for an infiltration team. SAhttps://www.maryferrell.org/php/crypsuedit.php?type=crypt&id=AMLEPTON#NTANA was paid a monthly salary under the provisions of his MOC until he was terminated on 15 October 1963 when the ratline developed by the team became inoperable due to occupation of the target area by Soviet technicians. Another compelling reason for SANTANA's termination stemmed from his untruthful reporting concerning certain aspects of the team operations." Memo from AC/WH/COG to C/CI/R&A Ray Rocca, 1967.
180-10144-10234 HSCA Segregated CIA Collection (staff notes):
Emilio Santana was a DDP operational contact from 12/15/60 to 10/15/63. He was allegedly dropped by the CIA because "the Cuban group was no longer viable and some of his reporting was untruthful".
1993.07.20.08:05:37:460530: DEBRIEFING OF SAL MORGAN
Re 11/6/63: "Rogelio 'Cucu' Hernandez Vega. Complete REDACTED traces were transmitted to REDACTED 13 January 1948, shortly before the murder of Hernandez in the Cuban Embassy, Mexico City. The killer of Hernandez, Sandalio Hermino Diaz Garcia (201-203040) described this incident in REDACTED, 6 November 1963."
104-10071-10230: DISPATCH: DEC 1963 PROGRESS REPORT
December 1963 AMLEPTON progress report. Do not see the October-November 1963 reports on MFF. Masferrer and Enrique Molina Rivera among those listed.
10/29/64, cable WAVE 4038 from JMWAVE to Director: "Request traces foll person to be interrogated under ref program: Francisco Rodriguez Tamayo aka "El Mexicano", A 11 880 272...Captain Rebel Army 57 until defected US June 59. Ramimo (Sanchez) Montesino ex Brigade member states Roberto (Perez) Crusata while in jail after invasion and shortly prior his execution informed Sanchez that Cuban intel chief (sic) Efigino Amejeiras Delgado had indicated Rodriguez Tamayo and Humberto (Rodriguez) Diaz paid Castro agents (DBA 47334, 23 July 63) WAVE "a subject for interrogation - he had spent the last year in California before returning to Miami (AMLEPTON team)." After string of more than 20 case file references, request is made to assign a 201 number to Rodriguez Tamayo.
One of the "sensitive document input records" showing how the AMLEPTON data was indexed.
104-10112-10156: TYPED INFORMATION ON DALZELL, WILLIAM WAYNE, SANTANA, EMILIO, AND PANEQUE
Emilio Santana was interviewed by Jim Garrison Feb. 12-17, 1967: Santana was 201-336856. "He was reported...as a DDP contact from December 1960 to 15 October 1963. However, a Memorandum of Correction from WH/COG, dated 9 July 1967, states that Santana was recruited in October 1962 and after training participated in a single infiltration-exfiltration operation. From 12 to 17 February he was questioned by (New Orleans DA Jim) Garrison and staff."
"Ex-Spy Says She Drove To Dallas With Oswald & Kennedy 'Assassin Squad'" . New York Daily News
Membes of the pro-Batista paramilitary group Masferrer's Tigers, executed just days after the triumph of the Revolution, as dozens of members of the armed forces, police, and Batista supporters were ordered killed by Raúl Castro. The night of January 11th and into the early morning hours of January 12th, the men were lined up in pairs in front of ditches dug up earlier that day at the Madrevieja Shooting Practice Field, San Juan Hill, and shot by firing squad. The mass graves were then filled with a bulldozer, according to witness reports, some were buried still alive. In September 1963, torrential rains from Hurricane Flora unearthed the bodies from their shallow grave and they were thrown in cement casings into the Bartlett Deep, off the coast of Oriente
"In his statement this man said the following: in the month of March, 1961, around the seventh, Mr. Vicente Leon arrived at the base in Guatemala at the head of some 53 men saying that he had been sent by the office of Mr. Joaquin Sanjenis, Chief of Civilian Intelligence, with a mission he said was called Operation 40. It was a special group that didn't have anything to do with the brigade and which would go in the rearguard occupying towns and cities. His prime mission was to take over the files of intelligence agencies, public buildings, banks, industries, and capture the heads and leaders in all of the cities and interrogate them. Interrogate them in his own way”.
The individuals who comprised Operation 40 had been selected by Sangenis in Miami and taken to a nearby farm "where they took some courses and were subjected to a lie detector."
(General Fabian Escalante, Security of the State, Cuba, author of the book The Plot))
Part 7: The Hand-off from de Mohrenschildt to the Paines
by Bill Simpich, Jun 3, 2012
https://www.maryferrell.org/pages/Essay_-_Oswald_Legend_7.html
When Oswald and his family returned to the Dallas-Fort Worth area from the Soviet Union, they knew that they had to make contacts if they were going to put food on the table. Oswald sought out Peter Gregory shortly after his arrival. Peter Gregory described himself as an "oil consultant" who came from Russia in 1923. He was also a translator who had his son Paul take Russian lessons from Oswald's wife Marina. Gregory provided Oswald with a letter certifying Oswald's ability to serve as a translator. Gregory commented on Oswald's pronounced Polish accent, which was a result of Oswald's extended time with Legend Maker #8 Alexander Ziger and the entire Ziger family.
George DeMohrenschildt
George DeMohrenschildt
Dallas oilman/spy George de Mohrenschildt became a benefactor to the Oswald family, providing them with money and contacts after their return to the US from the Soviet Union. As discussed earlier, de Mohrenschildt's lawyer Max Clark was also General Dynamics' industrial security consultant and a leader within the White Russian community. Oswald contacted Max Clark's wife shortly after his return, explaining that the Texas Employment Commission had referred her to him as a Russian-speaker and that his wife would like to spend time with another Russian-speaker.
Both Peter Gregory and Max Clark displayed furtiveness and unclean hands after JFK was killed. On 11/28/63, Gregory assisted the Secret Service in translating a lengthy interrogation of Marina Oswald. On 11/29/63, both Gregory and Clark told FBI agent Earle Haley that Oswald had obtained their names from the Fort Worth Public Library, where Gregory worked. When Clark testified before the Warren panel, he changed his story to say that Oswald was referred to his wife by the Texas Employment Commission (TEC). Clearly, both men had initially tried to keep their TEC contacts away from public view. The TEC - better known as the state unemployment agency - kept extensive records on Oswald that are now available and open up all sorts of questions. After a complaint by the Warren Commission staff that these earlier reports contradicted the Warren Commission testimony, Hoover ordered Legend Maker #6 FBI supervisor Marvin Gheesling to confront them on these contradictions.
When Gheesling re-assigned the case to the Dallas FBI office, agent Earle Haley went back and re-interviewed Clark and Gregory. Haley was a personal acquaintance of Max Clark, who used to work with the man Max referred to as "Earle". Gregory wouldn't change his story and blamed it on Oswald, while Clark said he heard about the whole issue second-hand from his wife, who always knew Oswald got her name from the Texas Employment Commission. Max's wife Gali Clark was treated with kid gloves. Her maiden name was Gali Scherbatoff, born in France - an exiled Russian princess and "very much opposed" to the Communists. There's no indication that Haley or anyone else ever followed up with her.
Oswald had legend makers precisely because he and his wife presented a perceived threat to national security
De Mohrenschildt visited and exchanged cards and letters with CIA official J. Walton Moore on a regular basis during the fifties and sixties. Moore wrote a memo in 1977 claiming that he only met de Mohrenschildt twice, in 1958 and in 1961. Moore's hazy memory on the number of visits was exposed by the House Select Committee on Assassinations. In 1964, a similar memo by Moore admitted that he met de Mohrenschildt in 1957, "several times" in 1958 and 1959, and the last time in 1961. There was more than just that. De Mohrenschildt sent Moore a stack of contact reports in 1957 and 1958. In 1958, Moore used de Mohrenschildt as a "contact" with a Polish official. In 1960, Moore referred to de Mohrenschildt as a "cleared contact" for a copy of a memo on the USSR's use of petroleum.
Moore visited the de Mohrenschildts' home in late 1961 to see a movie of their "walking tour" from Mexico to Panama. Although the de Mohrenschildts said that they were tracking the mining trails of the old Spanish conquistadors, they found themselves with hundreds of Cuban exiles in Guatemala City, a staging area for the Bay of Pigs invasion that was about to begin. De Mohrenschildt revealed a few hours before his death that Moore took him to lunch in late 1961, and described to him an ex-Marine in Minsk in whom the CIA had "interest". In the summer of 1962, an associate of Moore suggested that de Mohrenschildt might want to meet Oswald. De Mohrenschildt then called Moore, suggesting that suitable payback would be a little help by the State Department with an oil exploration deal in Haiti.
CIA document describing 10 domestic<br />contact reports prepared by de Mohrenschildt
CIA document describing 10 domestic
contact reports prepared by de Mohrenschildt
After the assassination, R.S. Travis at the Domestic Contact Division identified ten separate domestic contact reports prepared by de Mohrenschildt, and tipped off the staff of Legend Maker #1 Jim Angleton at the counterintelligence office. Travis referred to de Mohrenschildt as Moore's "source," and asked Moore to provide his personal evaluation of George for the CI Staff. Moore wrote an intriguing evaluation that admitted that he had sought out de Mohrenschildt as "the result of a source lead from Headquarters" in 1957, but scrambled to avoid any direct admissions of the role he played in bringing de Mohrenschildt and Oswald together. Moore's evaluation was so carefully prepared that the file includes what appears to be a far-different rough draft.
Moore's poor memory triggered internal scrutiny by the CIA's Reinvestigation Program. Moore went so far as to tell the CI staffer for Angleton "there is no White Russian 'community' in Dallas. He knows of only a couple of Russian linguists who are used by the Socony labs for translation. Jim feels the word 'community' is inapplicable. In any event he has had no contact with any such group". This memo is one of several indications that the task for Angleton's staff was to sanitize de Mohrenschildt's checkered history. Moore was a former FBI agent and college roommate of Wallace Heitman, a Soviet language specialist who played the lead role for the FBI in controlling the first-day evidence.
Although US intelligence records on de Mohrenschildt go back to at least World War II, CIA Director Richard Helms said that the agency's "initial interest" in George de Mohrenschildt was because he had been a petrochemical consultant with the International Cooperation Administration (ICA). De Mohrenschildt was appointed by the State Department as the "petroleum adviser" for the independent communist Yugoslavian government in 1957, and testified to the Warren Commission that ICA was the only US government agency that ever paid him. The ICA became part of the Agency for International Development (AID) in 1961. The AID has been cited by its former director John Gilligan as being filled with CIA agents "from top to bottom...the idea was to plant operatives in every kind of activity we had overseas, government, volunteer, religious, every kind".
In early 1963, de Mohrenschildt passed on his "babysitting duties" for the Oswald family to Ruth and Legend Maker #12 Michael Paine. Ruth's father Bill Hyde was regional director of the Nationwide Insurance Company, part of the International Cooperative Alliance founded in 1895 and still active today. This similiarity between these two ICAs is not accidental - the contracts for both groups were coordinated through AID and the State Department. Both de Mohrenschildt and Hyde were business consultants that traveled abroad working on cooperative ventures and provided reports used by the CIA.
The covert action division of Legend Maker #2 Cord Meyer sought to use Hyde as a security consultant in Vietnam back in 1957, but CI-SIG's information on Hyde resulted in the denial of any security clearance. Hyde's problem, like Legend Maker #3 Priscilla Johnson, was that he was active with progressive causes and had family members involved with the United World Federalists. Meyer, the CIA covert action chief in 1963, had got into trouble with the FBI during the 1950s for his former role as president of the United World Federalists.
Keep in mind that the CIA was not supposed to have officers handling domestic agents tracking US citizens inside the country. That job was the FBI's turf. Routing slips show that interactions between Oswald and the FBI after his return were carefully scrutinized. The rivalry between the CIA and the FBI led to CIA officers trying to work around the system. In this setting, the ideal babysitters for the Oswald family were trusted people that were denied security clearances - such as de Mohrenschildt or Ruth's father. Whether or not the babysitter knew that they were being monitored by intelligence, the operation could be kept in an officer's vest pocket and never reduced to writing.
Ruth Paine and Marina Oswald became housemates after the Magnolia party
Ruth Paine
Ruth Paine
Ruth Paine met the Oswalds and George de Mohrenschildt at the party of Everett Glover on February 22, 1963. This is known as the "Magnolia party". Glover was a chemist with Magnolia Labs, a geology lab for Socony Mobil Oil -- the same "Socony labs" that Moore referred to when he argued that there was no White Russian community in Dallas. Glover and four other Magnolia employees approached Oswald and got him to talk for several hours about life in the Soviet Union. One of these employees, Norman Fredericksen, was the son of the former director of Radio Free Europe. As discussed in the previous chapter, de Mohrenschildt had many close ties with Radio Free Europe.
The Paines have been described by researcher Greg Parker as pragmatic pacifists. In an amazing coincidence, they moved from Pennsylvania to Oswald's mother's community of Irving, Texas during the second week of September 1959, the very week that Oswald abruptly left his mother and went off to defect to the USSR. They had made the move so that Michael could take a job with the military contractor Bell Helicopter. Michael said that Bell manufactured 40% of all of the aircraft used in the Vietnam War. Bell Helicopter was begun and run by Michael's stepfather, Arthur Young, the most recent husband of Michael's mother Ruth Forbes Paine.
Helicopters on the attack
Helicopters on the attack
The Paines probably had a handler within the intelligence community in 1959, whether they knew it or not. Based on their background with the World Federalists and Ruth's work with the Quakers and Soviet-American friendship committees, Cord Meyer is one logical candidate.
By 1963, Meyer was the chief of the covert action division. As discussed in the Preface, Frederick Merrill at the State Department put his stamp of approval on the East-West Contact Committee program organized by the Quakers that Ruth had worked on. Merrill was comfortable in this terrain - the following year, Merrill worked on the Robert Webster defector case that was linked to the Oswald defector case. Did some combination of Meyer, AID and Merrill's allies at the State Department persuade the Paines to keep an eye on this defector family?
Or were the Paines simply manipulated into position? Ruth had other intelligence operatives in her family - such as her sister Sylvia Hoke and her brother-in-law John Hoke - who could play a role in helping to convince her.
I think the most likely path is the simplest and most direct route. Michael Paine's family also had access to talent in the intelligence arena. Michael's parents - Ruth Forbes and Lyman Paine - had a close friend named Mary Bancroft. Bancroft was an OSS spy that had a long-term relationship with Allen Dulles. Bancroft was the granddaughter of Clarence W. Barron, the owner of the Dow Jones company, the manager of the Wall Street Journal, and the founder of Barron's Magazine.
Bancroft discusses Michael's parents at length in her book, Autobiography of a Spy. Bancroft remained very close with Ruth Forbes after she divorced Lyman Paine and married Arthur Young in 1948.
Dulles provided a 12/2/63 memo "from a friend" to the Warren Commission that described the inner workings of the Paine family. It is very informative - I will mention just a few of its findings here. Alan Weberman, who prepared a transcription of the 12/2/63 memo, believed that it was typed by Abigail Schaffner, but Schaffner knew Paine until 1948 - the letter writer only knew Paine until 1935. The letter-writer was also friends with Lyman in the 1920s - not possible for Schaffner, a young girl at that time.
The 12/2/63 letter is particularly important because the FBI was under intense scrutiny for failing to add Oswald to the Security Index, which would have had the government closely surveilling Oswald on 11/22/63. However, Michael's father Lyman was on the Security Index. This set off all kinds of alarm bells at the FBI.
The letter provided to Dulles helped persaude FBI criminal chief Bill Sullivan that the Paines were unconnected with the JFK assassination.
If the FBI had taken a hard look at the Paines, it would have realized that the Paines were intelligence-driven babysitters for the Oswalds - whether Ruth or Michael realized it or not.
The main thrust of the letter writer was to provide her "own evaluation of Lyman Paine, whom I also knew well in the 1920's...he could not do anything...he was thoroughly incompetent. However, he sure could talk." She knew Lyman "well in the 20s", but now Lyman and his new wife "were active in Trotskyite circles...not real Trotskyites, but belonged to some infinitesimal splinter group that as far as I know did nothing but sit around and talk, talk about how the other Trotskyists were 'betraying the Revolution' as conceived by Trotsky."
Bancroft had more than a passing interest in Trotsky. During one of her trysts with Allen Dulles, Dulles had put his hand over her mouth when a visitor came knocking at the door. Dulles said later that the visitor was Leon Trotsky, trying to provide Dulles with some "extremely valuable information".
Mary Bancroft's Autobiography of a Spy
Mary Bancroft's
Autobiography of a Spy
The letter-writer referred to Ruth Forbes in the third person: "I have also heard, but not from his mother, that Michael had homosexual tendencies - although he did marry and have children." Who else was also intimately familiar with Lyman, his Trotskyist beliefs, and the nature of Trotskyist splinter groups? Like the letter writer, Bancroft probably didn't see Michael after the divorce between Lyman and Ruth in 1934.
This was characteristic of the relationship between Dulles and Bancroft. In the middle of an unhappy marriage, Bancroft was very attracted to Dulles and the culture of espionage. Dulles' biographer indelicately described Bancroft as "randy and ready". Dulles made a proposal to her. "We can let the work cover the romance, and the romance cover the work."
Later on, the writer made a point of providing a clipped resume of Ruth Forbes' third husband, Arthur Young, the inventor of the Bell helicopter: "His researches have been extremely complicated and esoteric and he has worked with the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton -- consulted with them -- and also with Bell Laboratories."
Bancroft, a veteran spy and Ruth Forbes' close friend, was probably the mysterious author of the 12/2/63 memo. She proceeded to give it to Dulles - who gave it to Jim Angleton - who gave it to FBI liaison Sam Papich. None of them disclosed the letter writer's name. On 12/12/63, the hottest items went to FBI's Division 5 chief Bill Sullivan as part of a package exonerating the Paines from any connection with the assassination.
It seems evident that Allen Dulles was the main mover behind introducing de Mohrenschildt to the world of oil intelligence and the Paine family to Lee and Marina Oswald. Like Robert Wester and Lee Oswald, both de Mohrenschildt and the Paines appear to have been "co-optees" to the world of intelligence - the main question is whether they were witting or unwitting.
The best way to close this chapter is to look at what happened after the Magnolia party.
Ruth asked Marina Oswald if she would like to live with her so that she could improve her Russian. Lee was about to leave Marina while he went to his hometown of New Orleans to find steady work. Michael and Ruth were broken up and living in different houses - but Michael was always at Ruth's house.
Was this break-up for real? If Michael had been living with Ruth when Marina moved in, he would have been opening his home to a Soviet defector. He would have lost his Bell Helicopter security clearance in a heartbeat.
The more you look at the situation, the more remarkable it is. Michael and Ruth separated in late 1962 - but they were not legally divorced. Michael was still the owner of the home where Marina was living - and Marina was living with his children. Didn't Michael have an affirmative duty to report this situation to the security supervisor at Bell Helicopter? At a minimum, Bell Helicopter security would want to know what was going on.
Thanks to Barbara LaMonica, Greg Parker, Bill Kelly, and many other researchers for their insights on de Mohrenschildt and the Paines.
- Bill Simpich
Bill Simpich is an Oakland civil rights attorney who knows that it doesn't have to be like this. He was part of the legal team chosen by Public Justice as Trial Lawyer of the Year in 2003 for winning a jury verdict of 4.4 million in Earth Firster Judi Bari's lawsuit against the FBI and the Oakland police. He works with the Mary Ferrell Foundation to decipher the cryptonyms and pseudonyms used by intelligence operatives in the JFK documents, and suggests that we will achieve historical resolution in this case more quickly than most people believe.
See all chaptersNext => Part 8: The CIA-Army Intelligence Mambo
ENDNOTES
Peter Gregory...was also a translator who had his son Paul take Russian lessons from Oswald's wife Marina. Gregory provided Oswald with a letter certifying Oswald's ability to serve as a translator: Warren Commission Document 5, p. 290; SA Earle Haley interview with Peter Gregory, 11/29/63. Also see Secret Service report, below.
Gregory commented on Oswald's pronounced Polish accent: Secret Service report of Leon Gopadze, 11/29/63, p. 3, FBI - HSCA Administrative Folders/NARA Record Number: 124-10369-10062.
Oswald contacted Max Clark's wife shortly after his return: Warren Commission Hearings, Testimony of Max Clark, Volume 8, p. 344.
On 11/28/63, Gregory assisted the Secret Service in translating a lengthy interrogation of Marina Oswald: Secret Service report of Leon Gopadze, 11/29/63, p. 3, FBI - HSCA Administrative Folders/NARA Record Number: 124-10369-10062.
On 11/29/63, Clark and Gregory told FBI agent Earle Haley that Oswald had obtained their names from the Fort Worth Public Library, where Gregory worked: Warren Commission Document 5, p. 256, SA Earle Haley interview with Max Clark, 11/29/63; p. 290, SA Earl Haley interview with Peter Gregory, 11/29/63.
After a complaint by the Warren Commission that these these earlier reports contradicted the witnesses' Warren Commission testimony, Legend Maker #6 FBI supervisor Marvin Gheesling was forced to confront them on these contradictions: Memo from Warren Commission counsel J. Lee Rankin to FBI Director, 5/7/64; Memo from Gheesling to SAC, Dallas, FBI, 5/11/64, 105-82555 Oswald HQ File, Section 151, p. 49.
After Gheesling re-assigned the case to the Dallas FBI office, agent Earle Haley went back and re-interviewed Clark and Gregory: Warren Commission Exhibits 1888, 1889, 5/14/64.
Haley was a personal acquaintance of Max Clark, who used to work with "Earle": Warren Commission Hearings, Testimony of Max Clark, Volume 8, pp. 349, 352.
Gregory wouldn't change his story and blamed it on Oswald, while Clark said he heard about the whole issue second-hand from his wife: Warren Commission Exhibits 1888, 1889, 5/14/64.
The Washington Post and other papers ran a UPI article on 6/9/62 announcing the Oswalds' impending arrival to Dallas: "Third American in 2 Months Leaves Soviet 'Home'", Washington Post, 6/9/62.
The FBI has got him tagged and is watching his movements: Warren Commission Hearings, Testimony of Max Clark, Volume 8, pp. 351.
Marina's uncle and surrogate father Colonel Ilya Prusakov was with the MVD, the parent intelligence organization to the KGB...: William Hood, Mole, (W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1982) p. 305. See memo of Richard Helms to Warren Commission staffer J. Lee Rankin, 1/25/64, for the time period "18-31 March 1961".
...stationed in the Soviet embassy in New Delhi: Reel 13, Folder R - Marina Oswald, pp. 97-98.
De Mohrenschildt visited with CIA official J. Walton Moore and exchanged cards and letters, on a regular basis in the 1950s and 1960s: FBI memo by W. James Wood re meeting with George de Mohrenschildt, 3/7/64, Russ Holmes Work File/NARA Record Number: 104-10414-10179.
In 1964, a similar memo by Moore admitted that he met de Mohrenschildt in 1957, "several times" in 1958 and 1959, and the last time in 1961: Memo by J. Walton Moore, 5/1/64, Russ Holmes Work File/NARA Record Number: 104-10406-10105.
De Mohrenschildt sent Moore a stack of contact reports in 1957 and 1958: Contact reports, Reel 5, Folder L - George de Mohrenschildt, pp. 88-98, 100, 102, NARA Record Number: 1994.04.25.14:01:26:660005.
In 1958, Moore used de Mohrenschildt as a "contact" with a Polish official: J. Walton Moore, Process Sheet for OO/C Collections, 2/11/58, HSCA Segregated CIA Collection (microfilm - reel 5: Conte - De Mohrenschildt)/NARA Record Number: 104-10244-10184.
In 1960, Moore referred to de Mohrenschildt as a "cleared contact" for a copy of a memo on the USSR's use of petroleum: Memo from J. Walton Moore to Acting Chief, Contact Division, Houston, 4/28/60, Reel 5, Folder L -- George de Mohrenschildt, NARA Record Number: 1994.04.25.14:01:26:660005.
Moore visited the de Mohrenschildts' home in late 1961 to see a movie of their "walking tour" from Mexico to Panama: HSCA Report, Volume 12, p. 54.
Although the de Mohrenschildts said that they were tracking the mining trails of the old Spanish conquistadors, they found themselves with hundreds of Cuban exiles in Guatemala City, a staging area for the Bay of Pigs invasion that was about to begin: Warren Commission Hearings, Volume 9, Testimony of George de Mohrenschildt, pp. 213-217.
De Mohrenschildt revealed a few hours before his death that Moore took him to lunch in late 1961, and described to him an ex-Marine in Minsk in whom the CIA had "interest"...: Dick Russell, The Man who Knew Too Much (1992), p. 274.
After the assassination, R.S. Travis at the Domestic Contact Division identified the file numbers of ten separate domestic contact reports prepared by de Mohrenschildt, and sent a copy to the staff of Legend Maker #1 Jim Angleton at the counterintelligence office: Memo by R.S. Travis, Contact Division, to Paul Hartman, CI Division, 4/20/64, Reel 52, Folder C - George de Mohrenschildt, pp. 32-33, NARA Record Number: 1994.04.26.09:19:10:570005.
Travis referred to de Mohrenschildt as Moore's "source," and asked Moore to provide his personal evaluation of George for the CI Staff: Id., at p. 31.
Moore wrote an intriguing evaluation that admitted that he had sought out de Mohrenschildt as "the result of a source lead from Headquarters" in 1957, but scrambled to avoid any direct admissions of the role he played in bringing de Mohrenschildt and Oswald together: Memo by J. Walton Moore, 5/1/64, pp. 1-2, Russ Holmes Working File/NARA No. 104-10406-10105.
Moore's evaluation was so carefully prepared that the file includes what appears to be a far-different rough draft: Id. pp. 3-4.
Moore's poor memory triggered internal scrutiny by the CIA's Reinvestigation Program: Investigative Transmittal Sheet for Moore, 4/29/64, HSCA Segregated CIA Collection, Box 44 / NARA Record Number: 104-10124-10286; Processing Sheet, NARA Record Number: 104-10124-10284.
Moore went so far as to tell the CI staffer for Legend Maker #1 James Angleton that "there is no White Russian 'community' in Dallas. He knows of only a couple of Russian linguists who are used by the Socony labs for translation: Handwritten note by R.S. Travis, 5/27/64, Reel 52, Folder C - George de Mohrenschildt, p. 10.
Moore was a former FBI agent and college roommate of Wallace Heitman, a Soviet language specialist who played the lead role for the FBI in controlling the first-day evidence: Larry Hancock, Someone Would Have Talked (2010 edition), p. 326.
Although US intelligence records on de Mohrenschildt go back to at least World War II, CIA Director Richard Helms said that the agency's "initial interest" in George de Mohrenschildt was because he had been a petrochemical consultant with the International Cooperation Administration: Memo by Richard Helms to Warren Commission counsel J. Lee Rankin, 6/3/64, Warren Commission Exhibit 1012.
De Mohrenschildt was appointed by the State Department as the "petroleum adviser" for the independent communist Yugoslavian government in 1957...: Memo of SA Raymond Yelchak, 3/4/64, documenting receipt of de Mohrenschildt resume in 1958.
...and testified to the Warren Commission that ICA was the only US government agency that ever paid him: Warren Commission Hearings, Testimony of George de Mohrenschildt, Volume 9, p. 212.
The AID has been cited by its former director John Gilligan as being filled with CIA agents "from top to bottom...the idea was to plant operatives in every kind of activity we had overseas, government, volunteer, religious, every kind": George Cotter, "Spies, Strings, and Missionaries", The Christian Century (Chicago), March 25, 1981, p. 321, cited in William Blum's Killing Hope (2003), p. 235.
Ruth's father Bill Hyde was regional director of the Nationwide Insurance Company, part of the International Cooperative Alliance founded in 1895 and still active today: See this linked website of the International Cooperative Alliance.
This similiarity between these two ICAs is not accidental - the contracts for both groups were coordinated through AID and the State Department. Both de Mohrenschildt and Hyde were business consultants that traveled abroad working on cooperative ventures and provided reports used by the CIA: See Barbara LaMonica, "William Avery Hyde", Fourth Decade (November 1997), pp. 8, 11.
Meyer's covert action division had considered using Hyde as a security consultant in Vietnam back in 1957 , but CI-SIG's information about Hyde led to denial of any security clearance: 4/8/64 memo by Elizabeth Mendoza, Re: LHO Address Book (FBI Report 12/31/63) Oswald 201 File (201-289248)/NARA Record Number: 104-10300-10025. On the role of CI-SIG, see 12/5/63 memo by Chief, Research Branch/OS/SRS to Files, re William Avery Hyde.
Hyde's problem, like Legend Maker #3 Priscilla Johnson, was that he was active with progressive causes and had family members involved with the United World Federalists: Ruth Forbes Paine Young (Michael Paine's mother) was an influential member of the United World Federalists. George Michael Evica, A Certain Arrogance (Xlibris, 2006), p. 234. Also see the Arthur M. Young website section for Ruth Forbes Paine Young].
Glover was a chemist with Magnolia Labs, a geology lab for Mobil. Glover and four other Magnolia employees encircled Oswald and asked him to tell them about life in the Soviet Union for several hours. One of these employees, Norman Fredericksen, was the son of the former director of Radio Free Europe: This circle was described to Edward Epstein in his book Legend (1977), pp. 206-207, in interviews with participants Betty MacDonald, Norman and Elke Fredricksen, and Richard Pierce. This meeting was corroborated by Richard Helms, based on a report by J. Walton Moore. Memo of March 1964 by Richard Helms to J. Lee Rankin, Reel 44, Folder J, Lee Harvey Oswald Soft File, NARA Record Number: 1994.04.13.14:58:27:500005.
In an amazing coincidence, they moved from Pennsylvania to Oswald's mother's community of Irving, Texas during the second week of September 1959, the very week that Oswald abruptly left his mother and went off to defect to the USSR: Memorandum for file by SA Raymond C. Eckenrode, on March 25, 1964, p. 2, CD 849, p. 6.
They had made the move so that Michael could take a job with the military contractor Bell Helicopter. Michael said that Bell manufactured 40% of all of the aircraft used in the Vietnam War: A.J. Weberman interview with Michael Paine, circa 1993, found in Weberman's Coup D'Etat in America, Nodule 16.
Bell Helicopter was begun and run by Michael's stepfather, Arthur Young, the most recent husband of Michael's mother Ruth Forbes Paine: "Arthur Young with model helicopter", JFKCountercoup, 12/20/09].
By 1963, Meyer was the chief of the Covert Action staff: Cord Meyer, Memorandum for the Record, 4/17/63, pp. 1-4, Miscellaneous CIA Series/NARA Record Number: 104-10302-10000.
...and had worked on the Robert Webster case: Memorandum for the Record, by REDACTED, SR/COP/FI, 10/8/59, HSCA Segregated CIA Collection (microfilm - reel 17: Ruiz - Webster) / NARA Record Number: 104-10181-10128.
Note: The author of this Webster memo, still only known to us as SR/COP/FI, is the same individual who helped stop the second known effort to make Priscilla Johnson a CIA officer: See Memo from Director to REDACTED, 6/19/58, HSCA Segregated CIA Collection, Box 43 / NARA Record Number: 104-10119-10287.
In a heavily redacted document, the FBI was informed by a "reliable" source that Ruth's sister Sylvia Hyde Hoke was Naval Intelligence and was trying to obtain a top secret clearance: Commission Document 508 - FBI Mansfield Report of 06 Feb 1957 re: Hoke.
A CIA memorandum indicated that Sylvia Hoke was a CIA employee in 1961: Security File on Sylvia Hoke Hyde, HSCA Segregated CIA Collection, Box 43 / NARA Record Number: 1993.07.24.08:39:37:560310.
Washington Post obituary for John Hoke states that he was fired from AID in 1962: Emma Brown, "A Local Life", 3/19/11. Ruth Paine testified to the Orleans Grand Jury that Hoke was working for AID in 1963: Ruth Paine's testimony to the Orleans Grand Jury, 4/18/68, p. 57, Orleans Parish Grand Jury Transcripts.
These documents show Hoke was working for AID in 1963 and 1964: Request for Approval of Liaison, re John Hoke, 8/22/63, HSCA Segregated CIA Collection, Box 43 / NARA Record Number: 104-10120-10304; 8/13/64, HSCA Segregated CIA Collection, Box 43 / NARA Record Number: 104-10120-10303.
Michael Paine's family also had access to talent in the intelligence arena. Michael's parents - Ruth Forbes and Lyman Paine - had a close friend named Mary Bancroft: Mary Bancroft, Autobiography of a Spy (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1983); also see Evica, A Certain Arrogance, p. 248.
Michael and Ruth had ostensibly split up, and were living in different houses: Memo by SA James Hosty, 4/1/64, FBI - Ruth and Michael Paine Files / NARA Record Number: 124-10065-10356
G. Gordon Liddy
Nixon's attorney general, John N. Mitchel gave him $250,000 for Operation Gemstone, n action plan o carry out a series of black ops activities against Nixon's political enemies.
On 30th January, 1973, Liddy, Frank Sturgis, E. Howard Hunt, Virgilio Gonzalez, Eugenio Martinez, Bernard L. Barker, and James W. McCord were convicted of conspiracy, burglary and wiretapping. Liddy was sentenced to 20 years in prison but served only four years before President Jimmy Carter ordered his release.
In
1971, Liddy joined the White House Staff. Working under Egil Krogh,
Liddy became a member of the Special Investigations Group (SIG). The
group was (informally known as "the Plumbers" because their job was to
stop leaks from Nixon's administration).
On 3rd September, 1971, Liddy and E. Howard Hunt supervised the burglary of a psychiatrist who had been treating Ellsberg. The main objective was to discover incriminating or embarrassing information to discredit Ellsberg.
On 28th May, 1972, McCord and his team broke into the DNC's offices and placed bugs in two of the telephones. It became the job of Alfred Baldwin to eavesdrop the phone conversations. t soon became clear that the bug on one of the phones installed by James W. McCord was not working. As a result of the defective bug, McCord decided that they would have to break-in to the Watergate office again.
The original operation was unsuccessful and on 17th June, 1972, McCord, Frank Sturgis, Virgilio Gonzalez, Eugenio Martinez and Bernard L. Barker returned to O'Brien's office. However, this time they were caught by the police.
White House undercover operative
In
1971, after serving in several positions in the Nixon administration,
Liddy was moved to Nixon's 1972 re-election campaign in order to extend
the scope and reach of the White House "Plumbers" unit, which had been
created in response to various damaging leaks of information to the
press.
At CRP, Liddy concocted several plots in early 1972,
collectively known under the title "Operation Gemstone". Some of these
were far-fetched, intended to embarrass the Democratic opposition. These
included kidnapping anti-war protest organizers and transporting them
to Mexico during the Republican National Convention (which at the time
was planned for San Diego), as well as luring mid-level Democratic
campaign officials to a house boat in Miami, where they would be
secretly photographed in compromising positions with prostitutes. Most
of Liddy's ideas were rejected by Attorney General John N. Mitchell (who
became campaign manager in March 1972), but a few were given the
go-ahead by Nixon administration officials, including the 1971 break-in
at Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office in Los Angeles. Ellsberg had
leaked the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times. At some point, Liddy
was instructed to break into the Democratic National Committee offices
in the Watergate Complex.
Operation Gemstone
Operation Gemstone was a proposed series of clandestine or illegal acts, first outlined by G. Gordon Liddy in two separate meetings with three other individuals: then-Attorney General of the United States, John N. Mitchell, then-White House Counsel John Dean, and Jeb Magruder, an ally and former aide to H.R. Haldeman, as well as the temporary head of the Committee to Re-elect the President,
The first meeting occurred in the Attorney General's Washington, D.C., office at 11:00 a.m. on January 27, 1972. Liddy described in great detail both his plan to disrupt the upcoming Democratic National Convention in Miami Beach, Florida, and his plan to prevent any disruption of the upcoming Republican National Convention, then scheduled to take place in San Diego, California. Liddy's proposals would cost approximately $1 million to carry out. Among the various elements of Gemstone were plans to kidnap specific "radical" leaders, and others who might cause trouble at the Republican Convention, and hold them in Mexico until after the Convention was over.
John Dean described his recollections of this meeting to President Nixon on March 21, 1973, during the "Cancer on the Presidency" conversation: "So I came over and Liddy laid out a million dollar plan that was the most incredible thing I have ever laid my eyes on: all in codes, and involved black bag operations, kidnapping, providing prostitutes, uh, to weaken the opposition, bugging, uh, mugging teams. It was just an incredible thing.
The second meeting occurred one week later, on February 4, 1972, again at Mitchell's office. The participants of this meeting were the same four men as the first, although John Dean was not present for the entire meeting. Dean himself later testified that he arrived "very late" to the meeting. Liddy, Magruder, and Mitchell all disputed this claim. At the February 4 meeting, Liddy proposed a scaled-down plan that would cost $500,000 to enact. While less ambitious than the January 27 agenda, "Operation Gemstone" still involved several proposed criminal acts, most notably including the use of wiretaps to eavesdrop on telephone conversations involving Democratic party leaders
Beginning in April 1973, as the Watergate scandal began to unravel, Magruder and Dean both gave public and private testimony that was very damaging to John Mitchell. For his part, Liddy remained silent until the publication of his memoir Will in April 1980. However, all four men have publicly stated that the February 4 meeting adjourned without Mitchell having expressed any approval for any of Liddy's plans. More specifically, all four participants have publicly agreed that the break-in of the Democratic National Committee's Watergate offices, generally considered the emblematic crime of the Watergate scandal, did not come up in the meeting
John F. Kennedy Jr. was looking for an answer in the wrong place, and he paid with his life.
Fidel Castro had secret Line of Communication with CIA since 1959.
Three
months after the triumph of his Rebel Army, Fidel Castro visited United
States and met secretly at the CIA Headquarters, in Langley, Virginia.
| Add caption |
Ramon B. Conte Hernandez, one of the two security officers who attended the recruitment of Fidel Castro by the CIA in 1948 at the residence of Mario Lazo (Army Intelligence, World War I), lawyer for the United States embassy in Havana) . Ramon B. Conte was captured along with the other expedition members of the Bay of Pigs invasion. Unlike the other expedition members who served a short time in prison and were exchanged for tractors and jelly, Ramon Conte was kept in prison until 1986. Fidel Castro never explained the reason for such a long captivity.
 |
| Add caption |
Mario Lazo -AMTOUT-1- the influential Cuban attorney who recruited Fidel Castro for CIA
Cryptonym: AMTOUT-1 - Mary Ferrell Foundation
Cryptonym: AMTOUT-1 - Mary Ferrell Foundation
Lyman B. Kirkpatrick served as Inspector General and Executive Director of the CIA):
"My
friend Mario Lazo arrived in Washington from Havana and asked if I
could meet with him and the new Cuban ambassador. The three of us had
lunch in my office and they urged that the United States recognize the
Castro government as the only method of restoring order...Mario Lazo
was a highly respected Cuban lawyer. We had become good friends on my
several visits to Cuba"
.
Lyman B. Kirkpatrick, Jr. The Real CIA. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1968.
"My friend Mario Lazo arrived in Washington from Havana and asked if I could meet with him and the new Cuban ambassador. The three of us had lunch in my office and they urged that the United States recognize the Castro government as the only method of restoring order...Mario Lazo was a highly respected Cuban lawyer. We had become good friends on my several visits to Cuba"
.
Lyman B. Kirkpatrick, Jr. The Real CIA. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1968.
Biography of Mario Lazo -MTOUT-1- the influential Cuban attorney who recruited Fidel Castro for CIA
In the picture, Fidel Castro and Lisa Howard, ABC reporter
In April 1963, she traveled to Cuba to make an ABC special on Cuban leader Fidel Castro. During his filmed interview, as well as in private conversation with Howard, Castro made it clear that Cuba was interested in improved relations with Washington. On her return to the U.S., she was debriefed by CIA deputy director, Richard Helms. In a secret memorandum of conversation sent to President Kennedy, Helms reported: "Lisa Howard definitely wants to impress the U.S. Government with two facts: Castro is ready to discuss rapprochement and she herself is ready to discuss it with him if asked to do so by the U.S. Government. Subsequently, Howard used her Upper East Side apartment for the first meeting between a U.S. and Cuban diplomat, and for phone communications between Castro and the Kennedy administration.
According to her daughter, Fritzi, Howard became involved with Castro and viewed herself as a grand player on the stage of history. In an article for Politico detailing their relationship, Peter Kornbluh describes Howard's role as a liaison between the United States and Cuba as "intimate diplomacy," explaining that "her role as peacemaker was built on a complex, little-understood rapport she managed to forge with Castro himself – a relationship that was political and personal, intellectual and intimate.” [3] In order to continue the reconciliation agenda, she set up a meeting between UN diplomat William Attwood and Cuba's UN representative Carlos Lechuga on September 23, 1963, at her Upper East Side New York apartment, under the cover of a cocktail party. With Howard's support, the Kennedy White House was organizing a secret meeting with an emissary of Fidel Castro in November 1963 at the United Nations—a plan that was aborted when President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963. The new president, Lyndon B. Johnson, objected to normalizing relations with Cuba as he feared this would make him appear soft on Communism. Howard continued to work toward better relations, returning to Cuba to do another ABC special with Castro in February 1964 and becoming a go-between for communications between Washington and Havana.[5] When Argentine Marxist revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara came to New York in December 1964, she hosted a cocktail party for him and arranged a meeting between Guevara and U.S. Senator Eugene McCarthy. A selection of Howard's personal papers, including a draft letter to her "Dearest Fidel," a draft letter to President Kennedy, and her 1964 interview with Che Guevara, are available to read on the George Washington University-based National Security Archive's website.
Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Howard_(reporter)
Carlos Lechuga
https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKlechuga.htm
Lisa Howard
April 1963, she traveled to Cuba to make an ABC special on Cuban leader Fidel Castro.[6]
During his filmed interview, as well as in private conversation with
Howard, Castro made it clear that Cuba was interested in improved
relations with Washington. On her return to the U.S., she was debriefed
by CIA deputy director, Richard Helms.
In a secret memorandum of conversation sent to President Kennedy, Helms
reported: "Lisa Howard definitely wants to impress the U.S. Government
with two facts: Castro is ready to discuss rapprochement and she herself
is ready to discuss it with him if asked to do so by the U.S.
Government."[7] Subsequently, Howard used her Upper East Side
apartment for the first meeting between a U.S. and Cuban diplomat, and
for phone communications between Castro and the Kennedy administration.[5]
According to her daughter, Fritzi, Howard became involved with Castro and viewed herself as a grand player on the stage of history. In an article for Politico detailing their relationship, Peter Kornbluh describes Howard's role as a liaison between the United States and Cuba as "intimate diplomacy," explaining that "her role as peacemaker was built on a complex, little-understood rapport she managed to forge with Castro himself – a relationship that was political and personal, intellectual and intimate.” [3] In order to continue the reconciliation agenda, she set up a meeting between UN diplomat William Attwood and Cuba's UN representative Carlos Lechuga on September 23, 1963, at her Upper East Side New York apartment, under the cover of a cocktail party. With Howard's support, the Kennedy White House was organizing a secret meeting with an emissary of Fidel Castro in November 1963 at the United Nations—a plan that was aborted when President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963. The new president, Lyndon B. Johnson, objected to normalizing relations with Cuba as he feared this would make him appear soft on Communism. Howard continued to work toward better relations, returning to Cuba to do another ABC special with Castro in February 1964 and becoming a go-between for communications between Washington and Havana.[5] When Argentine Marxist revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara came to New York in December 1964, she hosted a cocktail party for him and arranged a meeting between Guevara and U.S. Senator Eugene McCarthy. A selection of Howard's personal papers, including a draft letter to her "Dearest Fidel," a draft letter to President Kennedy, and her 1964 interview with Che Guevara, are available to read on the George Washington University-based National Security Archive's website.[8]
Fidel Castro worked as a movie extra
When the CIA ran a LSD sex-house in San Francisco
On an elegant dead-end block on the north side of Telegraph Hill is 225 Chestnut St., a swanky modernist building with panoramic bay views. It’s about the last place you would have expected to find a clandestine CIA program during the Cold War.
President Eisenhower meeting the VP Richard Nixon in the Oval Office. August 1954.
40 Committee
On 17 February 1970, President Richard Nixon approved NSDM 40,[55] superseding and revoking NSC 5412/2,
and replacing the 303 Committee with the 40 Committee. Among the few
substantive changes introduced by Nixon was the inclusion of Attorney
General John N. Mitchell and a requirement to review covert programs annually.[56] Like earlier, public exposure was the motive for changing the name; National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger
explained to Nixon that "In view of recent mention of the 303 Committee
in the public media, the directive changes the committee name to
coincide with the number assigned to the NSDM itself, which is 40."[57]
The Secret Committee Called '40' - The New York Times
Oversight of United States covert operations - Wikipedia
Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, who chaired Special 40 Group and the 40 Committee, were fake hardliners. The excuse used to kill President John F. Kennedy, the Bay of Pigs fiasco, is ridiculous and false. Both Nixon and KIssinger have secretly supported the Chinese and Russian communists, and betrayed the American troops, secretly supporting the communists of northern Vietnam.
Richard Nixon, the chairman of the Special 40 Group, which made the decision to kill President John F. Kennedy allegedly because of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, secretly supported the Russian, Chinese and Vietnamese communists. In the photo, Richard Nixon with Leonid Brezhnev, during his visit to Russia.
Hwney Kissinger, the chairman of the 40 Committee, which is behind the overthrow and assassination of President Salvador Allende, behind the disappearance of thousands of South Americans during Operation Condor, behind the assassination of Orlando Letelier in Washington, and behind the shutdown of the cubana de aviacion plane in venezuela, secretly supported Iran and the Russian, Chinese and Vietnamese communists. In the photo, Henry Kissinger and Zhou Enlai, during his secret trip to Beijing in 1971.
Kissinger stopover in Pakistan during his secret trip to china in 1971. After arriving in Pakistan, Kissinger told the press that he 'was sick', and continued his secret trip to China.
Chauncey Halt, Mafia accountant and Meyer Lansky pilot, is the man to the right wearing dark glasses in this picture of Lee Harvey Oswald handing out flyers in New Orleans
There were two "Lee Harvey Oswald 'in Dealey Plaza: The real one, and the CIA agent William Seymour, Oswald's impersonator
Marita Lorenz - Spartacus Educational
Guillermo Novo - Spartacus Educational
"She said Oswald... visited an Operation 40 training camp in the Florida Everglades. The next time she saw him, Ms. Lorenz said, was... in the Miami home of Orlando Bosch, who is now in a Venezuelan prison on murder charges in connection with the explosion and crash of a Cuban jetliner that killed 73 persons last year."
"Ms. Lorenz claimed that this meeting was attended by Sturgis, Oswald, Bosch and Diaz Lanz, former Chief of the Cuban Air Force. She said the men spread Dallas street maps on a table and studied them...
“She said they left for Dallas in two cars soon after the meeting. They took turns driving, she said, and the 1,300-mile trip took about two days. She added that they carried weapons - "rifles and scopes" - in the cars...”
“Sturgis reportedly recruited Ms. Lorenz for the CIA in 1959 while she was living with Castro in Havana. She later fled Cuba but returned on two secret missions. The first was to steal papers from Castro's suite in the Havana Hilton; the second mission was to kill him with a poison capsule, but it dissolved while concealed in ajar of cold cream.”
I”nformed of her story, Sturgis told the News yesterday: "To the best of my knowledge, I never met Oswald."
After the murder of John F Kennedy, Frank Sturgis told to Marita Lorenz: “We killed the President that day. You could have been a part of it — you know, part of history. You should have stayed. ”
Frank Sturgis jouned Fidel Casttro guerrila in 1958 and taught guerriila warfare tactics
Ms. Lorenz described Operation 40 as an "assassination squad" consisting of about 30 anti-Castro Cubans and their American advisors. She claimed the group conspired to kill Cuban Premier Fidel Castro and President Kennedy, whom it blamed for the Bay of Pigs fiasco...
Gerry P. Hemming - Spartacus Educational
Gerry Patrick Hemming, a member of CIA Operation 40, was Oswald's Marine sergeant when he was stationed at CIA's U-2 base in Atsugi, Japan-where Oswald supposedly was recruited as a spy by the Soviets, or was being trained to be a double agent by the CIA.
Gene Wheaton - Spartacus Educational
David Morales
(center) with Thomas Clines (right) at Langley, toasting the death of
Che Guevara. David Morales, the trainer of Operation 40, also led in the
shadows the hun t for Cge Guevara
 |
Operation 40 was approved by President Dwight Eisenhower in March 1960.
Apparently the blowing up of the ship La Couvre in the port of Havana was the baptism by fire of Operation 40
Sylvia Duran's Interrogation
Sylvia Duran, the Cuban Consulate employee who processed the Oswald visa request, was arrested by Mexican authorities on November 23, the day following the assassination. The exact reason for her arrest, undertaken upon the request of the CIA's local station chief Win Scott, remains unclear - it appears there were stories of a Cuban conspiracy circulating prior to the appearance of Gilberto Alvarado a few days later.
Sylvia
was mistreated at the hands of Mexican authorities, and was bruised
during her interrogation. The police asked if she had paid Oswald money,
had a sexual relationship with him, and generally whether she had been
involved in a conspiracy with Oswald to kill President Kennedy.
Sylvia Durán – In her own words
Winston Scott was a master of American espionage, for more than a decade the CIA's chief operative in Mexico City.
In the 1960s, Mexico City was the Casablanca of the Cold War, a sanctu ary for spies, revolutionaries, assassins and provocateurs. Scott was, by all accounts, a brilliant proconsul, the confidant of three Mexican presidents, a personal favorite of Lyndon Johnson's, the object of leftist death threats, a puppet master of the counterintelligence craft. He presided over hundreds if not thousands of covert CIA operations during the time of dramatic defections, intricate surveillance projects, treacherous covert operations and, intriguingly, Lee Harvey Oswald's suspicious visit to Mexico City shortly before the Kennedy assassination.
At a federal court hearing in Washington early this month, a Justice Department lawyer gravely told U.S District Judge Charles Richey that the documents Michael Scott is seeking concerning his father are so sensitive that they can be described to the judge only by a senior CIA official behind closed doors. The court seemed unmoved.
Nellie CONNALLY on InnerVIEWS with Ernie Manouse
"Allen Dulles came to visit one time and we all went to the salt baths. I remember driving down there and noticing how gnarly Dulles' hands were. He had arthritis or gout and the salt baths were supposed to be good for that."
"In October 1968, Mexico City was just about shut
down," Leddy recalls. It was a time of political turmoil. "There were
tanks in the streets and all the schools were closed. In the midst of
this crisis, Allen Dulles and Richard Helms came to see Win Scott, I
assume to consult with him about what the U.S. should do. I remember
because they couldn't find a catering service that they could trust, so
when they had a party I had to pour the drinks."
"Dulles came a second time," Michael says softly. "I had totally forgotten that."
In June 1969, Win Scott retired at age 60. The following year, Michael and George, both 15, were dispatched to Connecticut to enter the 10th grade at a boarding school. Michael received typed letters, almost daily, from his father in Mexico City. In them, Win Scott never mentioned that he was writing his memoirs, actively seeking a publisher, and making CIA Director Richard Helms very, very nervous.
On April 26, 1971,
when Michael was working in the student cafe, he was summoned to the
dean's office. His stepbrother was already there. The two boys were told
that their father had died. They quickly arranged to fly to Mexico
City.
President John F. Kennedy's Civil Rights Address
"I forget what happened," Michael says, "but we missed the plane." A Morbid Mission
James Jesus Angleton didn't miss his plane.
Angleton,
the chief of counterintelligence and one of the most powerful figures
in the CIA, had known Win Scott since they were both in London in the
mid-'40s. He had been asked to talk to Scott about the manuscript and
was planning to do so when he heard the news that Scott was dead.
Angleton put aside his antipathy for all things Mexican (he was half
Mexican himself and ashamed of it) and flew to Mexico City. He had but
one goal in mind: to secure the memoirs.
Retrieving the memoirs of a well-connected dead person was a morbid errand not unfamiliar to James Angleton. Seven years earlier, in October 1964, the counterintelligence chief had undertaken a similar quest. A woman named Mary Meyer, who had been one of President Kennedy's mistresses, was murdered mysteriously on the C&O Canal towpath. A few days later, Angleton, who was skilled at picking locks, broke into the dead woman's house in search of a diary that she was known to have kept. He was discovered there by Mary Meyer's sister Toni Bradlee and her then-husband, Ben Bradlee, later executive editor of the Washington Post. When the diary finally turned up a few days later, the Bradlees handed it over to Angleton.
There are two accounts of what happened in the Scott family home on the afternoon of April 28, 1971. One comes from a recently declassified CIA cable written the next day by John Horton, who was the CIA's Mexico City station chief at the time. This cable is based on what Angleton told Horton right after the visit. (Horton is retired and living in Maryland; he declined to be interviewed for this article.) The other account comes from Michael Scott and George Leddy and is based on what Janet Scott has told her family and closest friends over the years. Janet Scott, a former CIA employee herself, also declines to talk to reporters.
Both versions of the Angleton visit indicate the same thing: that it was a tense, unpleasant meeting.
Angleton
is now dead. At the time he was a tall, gaunt man whose once-handsome
features had been pinched down to a sinister aspect by alcoholism and a
profession that required a certain amount of paranoia. Janet Scott was a
self-educated woman of diverse interests, who just 24 hours earlier had
buried her husband in the American-British cemetery in Mexico City. She
knew Angleton through Win and didn't care for him. She liked him even
less as she listened to his cordially brutal message.
According to the recently declassified CIA cable, Angleton expressed regrets about her husband's death, quickly adding mention of "the benefits to which she was entitled" but stressing that "our current information is tentative." Janet Scott's recollection of this ominous introduction is more specific. She has told her family that Angleton threatened her, saying that the Agency was planning to put up a plaque in honor of Win Scott at CIA headquarters in Langley, but that it might not proceed if she didn't cooperate.
Angleton, according to the CIA's cable, went on to warn Janet Scott that publication of the memoirs would violate two secrecy agreements and damage U.S. relations with foreign governments. He warned her not to read it, saying, accurately, that it "discussed in an open way intimate matters of previous marriage." When Angleton said the Agency wanted all copies of the manuscript, Janet Scott hastened to cooperate. She found the manuscript the next day and immediately turned it over to station chief John Horton.
"We got two original drafts and two carbons of manuscript," Horton then reported in his cable to CIA Director Richard Helms. Horton also reported removing "three large cartons and four valises with file folders, notes and memoranda of classified station files" from Win Scott's study.
Jefferson Morley: How Mexican Presidents Became CIA Agents
Horton closed with a word of cool candor to the now dry-eyed widow. According to his report, he acknowledged that Win Scott's friends "may feel Agency has pulled a fast one with manuscript." The Agency, he added, "was prepared to weather that one."
The story would end there, except
for Michael's choice of career: investigating other people's lives. He
became a documentary filmmaker, then a producer for NBC's "Unsolved
Mysteries," and now a director. (His latest movie, "All She Ever
Wanted," will air on ABC on April 14.)
Sometime in the 1970s, Michael says, he figured out his father had been associated with American intelligence. He didn't think much of it at the time. But in March 1986 he wrote a letter to the CIA, seeking the manuscript his stepmother had told him about 15 years before. He received a friendly note back inviting him to come to CIA headquarters whenever he was in the Washington area. That summer, he was in West Virginia shooting a documentary and took a day off to drive into Langley. Two senior CIA public affairs officers ushered him through the doors famously emblazoned with the credo "The Truth Shall Set You Free."
His
hosts praised his father generously. They talked about his Distinguished
Intelligence Medal, the Agency's highest honor. They said the Agency
had no problem giving him the manuscript, noting only that a few
sensitive things about Le Harvey Oswald had to be deleted. They handed
him a sheaf of papers and Michael Scott left a happy man.
Only when he actually got around to reading the pages did he feel a bit foolish. The bulk of the manuscript was missing. The CIA had given him the first nine chapters, about 90 pages, covering Win Scott's boyhood on a farm in Jemison, Ala., his semipro baseball career, his PhD in mathematics, his brief stint at the FBI, and his enlistment in the Navy and the beginning of his career in the Office of Strategic Services in 1944.
The Last Days of Lee Harvey Oswald: A Conversation with Ruth Paine
And
right there, Michael had to stop reading. The next 115 pages of his
father's book were missing, deleted virtually in their entirety in the
name of national security. The CIA threw in one of the final chapters,
which contained some general reflections about the intelligence
business.
Scott was angry. "Right when the story began to get
interesting, it stopped. In 1945. I at least wanted to get to 1955, when
I came into the picture." The Secrets
What exactly is so sensitive about Win Scott's unpublished memoirs, a quarter of a century old?
It's
not what Scott knew about Lee Oswald. His chapter on the accused
assassin was declassified in September 1993 along with a million pages
of CIA documents concerning the Kennedy assassination. His eight-page
description of the CIA's surveillance of Oswald in Mexico City does not
constitute any kind of "smoking gun" in the long-running debate about
the Kennedy assassination. Win Scott's personal conspiracy theory that
Oswald might have been a Soviet agent is not supported by recently
released KGB files on the subject. About the only thing that Scott's
Oswald chapter proves is that, after 33 years and four official
investigations, the CIA has yet to provide a coherent account of what
its officers knew about Oswald before the assassination.
Win
Scott did write that Oswald was "a person of great interest" to the CIA
during his visit to Mexico City between Sept. 27 and Oct. 2, 1963.
That's a rather different story from the the official line (as
articulated in a 1978 for-the-record memo by one top official) that the
Agency "had no real knowledge of his presence there."
Another
possible explanation for the CIA's skittishness about the manuscript
concerns other material that might have been seized with it. Scott, for
example, stated unequivocally that his subordinates in the Mexico City
station had photographed Oswald during his visit. The Agency denies that
any picture of Oswald was ever taken in Mexico City.
Yet
Stanley Watson, who served as Scott's deputy in Mexico City, said in
secret sworn testimony to congressional investigators in 1978 that the
Mexico City station's Oswald file contained two surveillance photos of
Oswald. In his testimony (which was declassified only in December,
Watson volunteered that Win Scott often kept sensitive files in his
personal safe at home. This safe was cleaned out and its contents hauled
away along with the manuscript after Angleton's visit in April 1971.
Might
there be a long-suppressed photo of Oswald among the papers? Scott's
lawyer, Mark Zaid, asked exactly that question in a motion filed in
support of Scott v. CIA et al. The CIA replied in writing that there is
no photo in its Win Scott archive.
Yet another possibility of
what the Agency fears is what the manuscript might say about Kim Philby,
the legendary Soviet spy who worked his way to the top of the British
intelligence services. From the summer of 1949 to the summer of 1951,
Philby was stationed in Washington, lived on Nebraska Avenue and worked
closely with top CIA officials -- including Win Scott and James
Angleton.
b n"Nobody in the CIA knew Kim Philby better than Win
Scott," says Cleveland Cram, a retired CIA counterintelligence officer.
"Nobody had worked with him so closely or so long."
Cram, a
career officer who had worked in London for many years, was called out
of retirement in 1978 to conduct a top-secret internal review of James
Angleton's career. The counterintelligence chief had been forced to quit
amid the CIA scandals of the mid-1970s. At one point, Cram says, he was
shown 30 to 40 pages of the still-censored portion of Win Scott's
manuscript and asked to comment on it. Cram says that Scott wrote about
his early suspicions of Philby.
The possibilities for what else lies in the manuscript are vast. Scott's career did not begin in Mexico City. Before he was 40, he was the chief of U.S. intelligence operations in postwar London. He helped Allen Dulles do a study of the British intelligence services that was influential in the creation of the CIA, and he went on to supervise all covert operations in Europe in the early 1950s.
Likewise, what Scott wrote about his friendships with top
Mexican political figures in the 1960s and about the Mexican crisis of
1968 would be big news in Mexico today. Many of those officials are
still alive, and the Institutional Revolutionary Party is facing the
strongest challenge to its rule since 1968.
As John Horton, the
CIA officer who actually physically removed the manuscript from the
Scott household, said, "Practically anything I told you about Win Scott
would get into classified matters."
Recently declassified CIA
files, for example, document the kind of espionage trick that Win Scott
excelled at. In 1963, to foment dissension, his agents planted phony
documents on a Cuban government official indicating that Castro's vice
minister of defense was a CIA agent. Security agents found the
documents, and four wholly innocent people were convicted of treason and
thrown in jail for years.
To
the left, William Seymour, a CIA Operation 40 member and Lee Harvey
Oswald's imopersonator. Estoy asumiendo que William Seymour, Oswald's
look-a-like, was the guy that on 27th September 1963 entered the office
of Sylvia Duran at the Cuban Consulate in Mexico requesting a Cuban
transit visa under the nane of Lee Harvey Oswald.
It is my guess that it was William Seymour who showed up on 25th September, 1963 at the house of Silvia Odio together with two other men, "Leopoldo and Angelo" as agents provocateur to involve the Junta Revolutionaria in the killing of President John F. Kennesy ,
And it was Williamn Seymour, impersonating Lee Harvey Oswald, the one who Antonio Veciana saw next to "Maurice Bishop". It is highly unlikely that CIA officers were hanging out publicly with the real Lee Harvey Oswald, a marine who had defected to the Soviet Union.
Antonio Veciana: "Maurice Bishop, my CIA contact agen
Essay - The Wheaton Lead - Mary Ferrell Foundation
The Wheaton Lead: An Exploration
by Larry Hancock and David Boylan, April 2020
Introduction
In support of the JFK Records Act of 1992, an independent agency - the Assassination Records Review Board - was formed, with the charter of locating and bringing into the national archives materials pertinent to the assassination of President John Kennedy. While the Board's primary focus was on unreleased government documents, it operated under the premise that assassination materials included both public and private materials - regardless of how they were labeled - which described, reported on, or interpreted the activities of persons or events related to the assassination itself as well as to subsequent inquiries.
The Board and its staff began work in October, 1994 and operated for four years. As part of its activities, Board staff held regional meetings to identify new sources of JFK materials, in particular those which might be held outside the primary agencies involved in the initial Warren Commission inquiry. Going beyond documents and written materials, its staff took testimony from individuals felt to hold relevant information - primarily from those with firsthand knowledge of events related to the assassination. Due to media visibility over the JFK Records Act and the Board's public meetings and work, a number of individuals privately contacted the Board with information they felt to be relevant to the Kennedy assassination. [ i ]
One of those individuals, Gene Wheaton, approached the ARRB with a fax to its chairman John Tunheim on October 20, 1995. Wheaton indicated that he felt he might have information relevant to the Board's work. As part of that contact Wheaton provided a four page biography of himself, as well as a letter of commendation from President Richard Nixon for Wheaton's earlier anti-drug work during an assignment in Iran. Wheaton's career experience was in law enforcement and security operations, initially with police work and then service with both the Air Force Office of Special (criminal) Investigations and with the Army Counter Intelligence Division (criminal and narcotics investigations). Following military service he had obtained his Bachelors Degree in law enforcement, and a Masters Degree in Public Administration. After obtaining his Masters he had moved into security consulting in the Middle East, working in Saudi Arabia, in Egypt (security design for the Cairo Airport) and as an advisor on security, police practices and anti-terrorism to the government of Iran. His work on counter-drug activities with Iranian law enforcement resulted in a special commendation from President Richard Nixon.
While in Iran he also worked as Director of Security for Rockwell International on its IBEX program, a project involving both photographic and communications intelligence surveillance and intelligence collections. [ ii ] Following his IBEX assignment, Wheaton did security consulting work with Iran, Egypt, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia; his assignments included working for Bechtel Corporation in the development of the huge Jeddah airport project. Wheaton's biographical data - which has been confirmed - was impressive, not only in respect to law enforcement, but in terms of his experience in intelligence and security practices.
In response to his initial outreach to the ARRB, Wheaton was sent a standard form letter signed by John Tunheim, the ARRB Chairman, thanking him for his interest and advising a staff member would be in touch with him. A follow-up letter was sent to Wheaton by ARRB staff member Thomas Samoluk in early February 1995, and Wheaton responded in a two-page written fax, accompanied by a CV of the individual whom he wanted to offer as a potential source of information on the assassination. He noted that the individual had worked for him in the mid-1980s, and had been a close personal friend at that time. The individual had an earlier career as a senior CIA paramilitary officer (his wife was also a high level CIA employee). He had worked as an operations officer on the CIA's Cuba project as well as in follow-on anti-Castro activities - his work had involved infiltrations, sabotage and assassination. While working for Wheaton in air transportation/logistics sales related to the Nicaraguan Contra effort, the individual had introduced Wheaton to Cuban and American veterans of the CIA's anti-Castro operations.
Wheaton's two-page fax stated that the conversations he had heard suggested that the former CIA officer and one of his key Cuban operatives had knowledge of a conspiracy against JFK and of individuals involved in the murder of President Kennedy. When Wheaton had first become aware of that information, he offered to work with the two men to arrange for Congressional immunity for their information - they had adamantly rejected that idea. At that point Wheaton was not sharing the identity of the CIA officer with the ARRB, instead he requested a personal meeting to discuss his information.
Wheaton's information was confirmed in a return letter from Thomas Samoluk and shared within the ARRB; Samoluk raised the question of whether or not to assign a staff member to determine Wheaton's credibility and the value of his information. Based on that discussion, a staff member (Anne Buttimer) was assigned and in April 1995 conducted a telephone call with Wheaton. Buttimer's call report states that Wheaton was only willing to discuss limited information by telephone; he made it clear that he possessed no documents directly confirming a conspiracy, but would provide documents confirming his association with the CIA officer in question, as well as documents confirming the officer's background.
As context Wheaton summarized the Contra-era activities, during which he had obtained his information, as well as the Cubans who were involved with Oliver North's Nicaragua project - outlining their conversations during which the Kennedy assassination had been discussed. He also described their remarks that the "street level" Cuban exiles involved in the assassination considered Kennedy a traitor for his actions as the Bay of Pigs; they had killed him for that treachery. He also noted remarks that the people "above the Cubans" had motives beyond simple revenge. Wheaton offered his information to the Board but insisted that he not be personally involved or that his name be used, because at the time he had initially offered to work on immunity arrangements, his former associates had promised to destroy his reputation if he pursued taking the information to the authorities. He concluded the interview by reaffirming that he was only offering a lead, but could provide documentation confirming his association with the individuals and their backgrounds with the CIA.
It appears that at some point a personal meeting between Wheaton and Buttimer did occur; it is referenced in a follow-up letter from Buttimer which makes mention of their meeting on July 11, 1995 and Wheaton's provision of certain materials. The materials Wheaton provided included a photo of the passport of Carl Jenkins, a detailed resume of Jenkin's education and work history including a reference as Chief of Base for the Cuba Project during 1960-61 (that position involved selection and training of cadre, assignment of officers, maritime infiltration and operational management of small teams and agents). It also documented Jenkin's 1964-65 assignment as a Senior Operations Advisor for a "still-sensitive" CIA Cuba project. Other documents included Wheaton's letter of July 9, 1985 appointing Jenkins as the Washington D.C. liaison for National Air. At the time Wheaton was Vice President of National Air (an air transportation business with some 23 aircraft, National Air had officers in Washington D.C, California and Lexington, Kentucky), copies of Jenkin's business cards (including mail drop locations with appropriate business "covers"). The copy of Carl Jenkins business card contained a note naming various individuals with whom Jenkins had made connections for Wheaton, including Rafael (Chi Chi) Quintero, Nestor Pino, Bill Borde and Rob Owen.
Based on ARRB internal communications and records we know a good deal about what Wheaton offered and made available to the Board. However follow-up research by Stuart Wexler determined that the ARRB staff member with the most contact with Wheaton left the Board at the end of 1995. [ iii ] Following her departure no further Board contact was made with Wheaton. Frustrated, he made his own final outreach to the ARRB in March, 1998. In a fax to the Board, Wheaton reviewed his earlier contacts and the materials he had provided - including those passed on to Buttimer. He then inquired as to whether the Board had conducted any actions or inquiries with his lead. In response he was sent a standard form letter thanking him for his materials and assuring him all the leads provided to the Board had received careful review. That letter came not from ARRB staff but rather from the Press and Public Affairs Officer of the ARRB.
Wheaton's attempt to offer an assassination lead to the ARRB, similar to information which he had previously been willing to take to Senator Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania, was provided confidentially to a body created by the U.S. Congress, clearly not in any attempt to gain public visibility or profit for Wheaton. There is no indication that Wheaton tried to publicly promote the lead which he provided to the ARRB. We only know of Wheaton's approach to the ARRB and of the material he provided because of the public release of the ARRB's own documents.
Researcher Malcolm Blunt came across those documents while working in the records at the National Archives and brought them to the attention of one of the authors (Hancock). Hancock and Stuart Wexler were then able to locate CIA documents which fully corroborated Wheaton's description of Carl Jenkins as well as with one of the individuals - Rafael Quintero - noted by Wheaton as an associate of Jenkins in anti-Castro operations. Over time further research confirmed extensive details of the association of the two men as well as Jenkin's involvement in the anti-Castro activities and projects which Wheaton had briefly referenced.
It is important to note that Wheaton himself offered no information about the Kennedy assassination other than certain remarks he heard - remarks made in conversation among the men he was associating with during his Contra-era air transport sales efforts. Those remarks had been made while recalling old projects and individuals the men had worked with operationally in anti-Castro efforts for the CIA. The individuals involved and being discussed had either been trained by Carl Jenkins or were known to him through anti-Castro CIA projects.
Wheaton himself had assumed that the information he had provided to the ARRB would remain confidential. However information from his correspondence eventually allowed him to be located. With documents provided by Hancock, researcher William Law managed to locate Wheaton and inquire as to his approach to the ARRB, informing him that the documents he had provided them had actually been released to the public.
Wheaton was surprised but agreed to a personal conversation with Law. During that conversation he acknowledged his approach to the ARRB and confirmed he had submitted the documents shown him. He also agreed to a spontaneous request for a brief video interview by Law (as filmed by Mark Sobel). During that interview Wheaton remained consistent in refusing to suggest that he personally knew anything further about the assassination than the lead which he had offered the ARRB. He was however willing to expand on his own personal and business relationships with Jenkins and Quintero. His comments during that interview provide us with the only insight into his experience and his lead beyond the materials he had provided to the ARRB.
The Wheaton Interview
In this interview with Wheaton, conducted by William Law and Mark Sobel, Wheaton opened up to a limited degree about what he had witnessed. The following quotes are excerpted from the interview [ iv ], which can be watched in its entirety by clicking the image above.
"Carl Jenkins was a retired high-level paramilitary specialist for the CIA.....He headed up the largest covert base in Laos during the secret CIA wars over there when the open war was going on in Vietnam.....[Jenkins] invited me to stay in their home.....In 1985 he [Jenkins] became my Washington representative when I took over as Vice President for a cargo airline called National Air.....I was like a brother to Carl.....Carl was the head recruiter and trainer of the Bay of Pigs invasion for the assassins and saboteurs that were going into Cuba for the pre-invasion to lay the groundwork for the Bay of Pigs.....He trained the 17, 18, 19 year old exiles and became their father figure.....Chi Chi Quintero became like a son to Carl.....He [Quintero] and two or three others, Felix Rodriguez, Nestor Pino, all went to Vietnam with him.....Chi Chi was a shooter. He was trained by I.W. Harper.....There was a CIA funded program to assassinate Castro and Carl was in charge of training the Cubans from Miami.....They were the ones that diverted the Castro assassination funds and training for their own agenda to snuff Kennedy.....They had a thing called a triangulation shooting team.....[Describing the Bay of Pigs and JFK backing off the air strike] They were furious and still are to this day.....And there was another clique above them.....they would reminisce about the past and what went wrong and what went right....."
Context
As background to Wheaton's ARRB lead and the comments in his interview it is important to note that the Contra era conversations Wheaton heard significantly affected him, both in regard to his personal friendships with Jenkins and Quintero and by raising his concerns about rogue/illegal actions by CIA operations officers. The "war stories" and gossip had deeply troubled him - suggesting illegal arms deals as well as a pattern of CIA activities involving political assassination. In retrospect, certain of those rumors have proved to be quite correct, emerging in the Iran/Contra scandal. Others, involving rogue activities by CIA officer Theodore Shackley, were little more than gossip and remain questionable even though we can now confirm that both Shackley and Jenkins were indeed involved in both multiple efforts to assassinate Fidel Castro.
Eugene Hasenfus broke the Iran-Contra story
Wheaton's concerns about such Contra-era Nicaraguan activities led him to express his concerns to journalist Daniel Sheehan. Wheaton supported Sheehan's efforts to investigate rogue actions in Nicaragua, even writing an affidavit in support of an investigation. However Wheaton was embarrassed by the fact that his primary source for the information - Carl Jenkins - ultimately refused to support his affidavit, thus undermining Sheehan's claims. In his book on Theodore Shackley (Blond Ghost), David Corn calls out the specific assertions made against CIA officer Theodore Shackley as being nothing more than gossip, gossip inferring that "a rogue element in the U.S. government had engaged in a host of nefarious activities including assassination".
Certainly it is true that Wheaton himself had no firsthand information on such activities and was simply making inferences from things he had heard. It was also fair for Corn to assert the lack of actual facts linking Shackley to rogue activities. However with the information and documents that have surfaced over more recent decades it is also accurate to observe that CIA officers including Theodore Shackley, Tracy Barnes and Carl Jenkins certainly were associated with a variety of political assassination efforts - efforts not sanctioned or known to the highest levels of the American government, including the President or National Security Council. [ v ]
Beyond that, certain elements of Wheaton's "gossip" about rogue operations in Central American and Iran have also been historically substantiated. In fact the investigation of the Reagan/North era Contra activities and the Iran/Contra scandal (including information in Oliver North's notebooks) confirmed the involvement of several of the persons (including Rafael Quintero and Felix Rodriquez) which Wheaton had mentioned to Sheehan. [ vi ]
In regard to the JFK assassination, the remarks which Wheaton had heard and his commitment to his career in law enforcement led him to conclude that the proper thing to do would be to encourage his friends Jenkins and Quintero to take information on an assassination conspiracy to the authorities. He expressed that to them, offering to work at brokering an arrangement for immunity. Both men declined to participate, instead warning Wheaton that they would deny any information he himself might offer. While Wheaton and Quintero appear to have remained somewhat friendly (Quintero never actually refuted Wheaton's narrative, simply saying he might have misunderstood some aspects of the conversations), Carl Jenkins became far more hostile, denying everything and making bitter remarks against Wheaton.
In later years, concerned by the rumors he had heard of CIA clandestine operations and rogue actors, as well as the revelations in the Iran/Contra scandal, Wheaton continued to remain interested in and actively investigated other incidents which he felt to have been suspicious - and which might have involved CIA actors (sanctioned or otherwise). His interests ranged from the Arrow Air crash in 1980 to the Gander crash in 1985, both of which he suspected might have involved retaliation for clandestine CIA operations. In later years Wheaton pursued other investigations as a consultant, including the rumors of drug smuggling though Mena, Arkansas (smuggling which reportedly involved former CIA anti-Castro figures) and later the murder of Vince Foster.
While his work on those investigations remains controversial, the fact remains that until the JFK Records Act and the formation of the ARRB, Wheaton made no move to promote or tout his Kennedy assassination lead - and when he did approach the ARRB it was only to offer them a lead - and two names, Carl Jenkins and Rafael Quintero.
It is that - those names, and the concept that individuals involved in anti-Castro operations and in Castro assassination efforts were also involved in Kennedy's murder - that is the subject of this research paper.
Exploring the Wheaton Lead
One of the most fundamental challenges in JFK assassination research is dealing with third party sources who appear to provide insights into the origins and motive(s) of a conspiracy related to President Kennedy's murder. The starting point in evaluating the sources is obvious. First there must be independent documentation verifying that they were personally associating with the individuals they themselves name, at a point in time when they claim to have obtained the information. Second, their sources must be determined to have been in a position to have heard or otherwise obtained the information being described.
Beyond that, information which has been officially offered to law enforcement or official investigative bodies gains an additional level of credibility given that the source is not only exposing themselves to legal action but also demonstrating a personal risk by being on record with information which may become public.
Finally there are consistency checks on the information itself. One of the most important is whether any connections can be determined among the names related by the sources. If multiple separate sources independently provide names which can then be verified to actually have been connected in a historical context, the information rises to a higher level of credibility.
This paper has two goals. First it summarizes our efforts to investigate the Wheaton lead and apply rigorous vetting criteria. That involves an especially deep document dive into the CIA backgrounds of Carl Jenkins and Rafael Quintero. That has been a work in itself, simply because before Wheaton's surfacing of Jenkin's name virtually nothing was known about the major role he played in the initial Cuba Project under President Eisenhower, in association with Castro assassination efforts and his 1963 return to a key role in the highly secretive AMWORLD project. The extent of Quintero's involvement in those projects was also not known, nor was his later role in the Reagan era Contra covert action under Oliver North.
Manuel Artime and Ricardo Chavez
Beyond that the paper goes further - and deeper - than the attempt to direct inquiries towards Carl Jenkins and Rafael Quintero. That became possible as our initial research effort expanded into a study of Jenkin's and Quintero's own associations, during the Contra era where they were working with Wheaton, but much more importantly into their extensive anti-Castro activities of the Eisenhower/Kennedy administrations and the individuals with whom they were associated during those paramilitary operations. That research led us into a great deal of detail which appears to corroborate Wheaton's belief that Jenkins and Quintero (and other unnamed individuals likely present during the Contra era conversations) were indeed in the position to have heard the remarks which Wheaton described.
And in sum, the Wheaton lead lends considerable weight to a remark directly attributed to Wheaton's friend Rafael Quintero in Quintero's own obituary: [ vii ]
"If I were ever granted immunity, and compelled to testify about past actions, about Dallas and the Bay of Pigs, it would be the biggest scandal ever to rock the United States."
Following the Lead
Wheaton related to the ARRB that in the mid-1990s he had heard conversations among individuals who commented on the motives and activities of participants in the murder of President Kennedy. The conversations involved former CIA operations (paramilitary) officers as well as Cuban exiles who had been involved in CIA activities for decades. At the time Wheaton was managing an air transport company and seeking business shipping materials to Central America in support of the Reagan-era covert North/Secord Contra warfare against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua.
Based on documents Wheaton supplied to the ARRB, we know that two of the men involved in the conversations were Carl Jenkins (CIA pseudonym James Zaboth), hired by Wheaton to lead his sales effort, and Rafael Quintero (CIA Crypt AMJAVA-4), a personal friend of Jenkins and one of the two Cuban exile field managers running Contra support operations in Central America for Oliver North and Richard Secord.
While Jenkins did not specifically name the other individuals involved in the conversations it seems likely that they included Felix Rodriquez (AMJOKE-1), the other Cuban exile logistics manager working along with Quintero for North/Secord. Luis Posada (AMCLEVE-15, CIFENCE-4, WKSCARLET-3) is another probable participant, brought into the Contra project by Felix Rodriquez and working with Contra supply logistics and transportation. Much less likely would have been the participation of Ricardo (Rene) Chavez, initially brought into Contra activities by JMWAVE CIA officer Tom Clines. [ viii ]
Manuel Guillot
Felix Rodriquez was literally a legend within the CIA and Cuban exile communities, one of a very few paramilitary officers to be publicly acknowledged as a CIA employee. We now know that he was also a key figure in a highly secret CIA effort to kill Fidel Castro in a sniper attack, prior to the Cuban exile landings at the Bay of Pigs beaches in Cuba. Released CIA operational and personnel documents provide a good deal of context on the anti-Castro operations of 1960-1964, specifically the roles played by Jenkins, Quintero, and Felix Rodriquez. In contrast Posada and Chavez had nothing like Rodriquez's experience, although Posada had trained at Fort Benning as had Rodriquez, and Chavez had been recruited into the same Artime/AMWORLD project of 1963/64 which Felix Rodriquez had also joined. Chavez's role was as a Swift boat driver and later head of the Maritime section as Major Chavez.
While Wheaton himself offered no names beyond those of Jenkins and Quintero, and no details of the conversations to which he was privy to during late night social sessions, the author's research offers the following speculation on those conversations, based on a deep dive into the history of the anti-Castro and Contra era associations of Jenkins and Quintero.
War Stories
It seems quite likely that the anti-Castro era names who would come up during the late night drinking/talk sessions Wheaton described would include not only men who had been operationally active with Jenkins, Quintero and Rodriquez during anti-Castro missions, but also names which would relate to their then-current Contra activities in Nicaragua. One name that would come up in respect to both would be that of one of the earliest Cuban exile volunteers to enter the Contra struggle in Nicaragua, Nestor "Tony" Izquierdo. Izquierdo (Brigade number 2586) had also been one of the earliest volunteers for the CIA anti-Castro project circa 1960.
with Rodolfo Hernandez and Hal Feeney
He had escaped from Cuba via Mexico and shortly after his arrival in Miami had been recruited into a group being trained to go into Cuba as part of a covert effort to organize a successful resistance movement against the Castro regime. That effort evolved in the first major CIA Cuba Project and Izquierdo's skills earned him entry into parachute jump training. He became one of a select number of volunteers (including Felix Rodriquez and Rafael Quintero) who were infiltrated into Cuba prior to the 1961 Cuban Expeditionary Force landings. Izquierdo was successfully inserted into Cuba in a variety of missions.
While both Rodriquez and Quintero went into Cuba multiple times by boat, Izquierdo reportedly dropped onto the island in a very risky night parachute jump. Izquiredo was inside Cuba at the time of the Bay of Pigs landings but managed to work his way off the island following that disaster. It also appears that Izquierdo may have used the Navy base at Guantanamo during his missions and he was associated with Navy ONI officer Hal Feeney, Navy chief of intelligence at Guantanamo; Feeney is on record as supporting JMWAVE missions into Cuba and also consulted with CIA Miami Station staff including David Morales in planning anti-Castro activities.
After making his way back to Florida Izquierdo became a regular CIA asset, part of the exile group used in ongoing CIA JMWAVE maritime infiltrations. He continued in that effort into 1963, participating in numerous maritime missions into Cuba - missions personally organized and led by Rip Robertson.
By early 1964 Izquierdo, along with Felix Rodriquez, had been recruited into a new and highly deniable offshore anti-Castro project designated as AMWORLD. As part of that project he was covertly exfiltrated out of the United States to Nicaragua. Later in 1964 Izquierdo was recruited by Rip Robertson for a very select paramilitary team sent into secret operations in the Congo. Following his time in the Congo, Izquierdo became involved with some of the most radical exile groups including CORU. Ultimately he became one of the earliest Cuban volunteers to go to Nicaragua to train Contra rebels to fight against the Sandinista regime. He was killed in 1979, during an air mission into Nicaragua.
Luis Posada, brought in to work on Contra logistics support operations by Quintero and Felix Rodriquez, had been associated with Izquierdo in one of the most violent and activist Cuban exile groups - CORU. Posada was one of the founders of CORU and was himself involved in multiple assassination efforts against Fidel Castro (working as a covert asset of CIA officer David Phillips) as well as in the mid-air time bomb attack on a civilian Cuban airliner.
Along with Izquierdo, another familiar figure most likely to have come up in the war stories heard by Wheaton would have been Rip Robertson (William "Rip" Robertson; CIA pseudonyms Irving Cadick and William Rutherford). Robertson was a key figure in the men's former missions, as well as in relation to Nicaragua. Robertson had been one of the early post-WW II CIA paramilitaries (as was Carl Jenkins) and had served in the CIA's first major covert regime change operation - PBSUCCESS, the Guatemala project which replaced the elected president of that nation in 1954. In PBSUCCESS Robertson served along with CIA officers David Phillips, David Morales and Henry Hecksher; later all would become deeply involved in the CIA efforts to oust Fidel Castro.
During PBSUCCESS, Robertson, known as a "cowboy" within CIA field operations, had become so close to Nicaraguan president Somoza that at Somoza's urging he had sent an airstrike against a neutral freighter off Guatemala, causing an international incident. That had so annoyed CIA headquarters that Robertson was essentially banned from CIA missions for several years, taking up residence in Nicaragua and starting his own business there.
Cuban maritime mission team in 1962
However, with the start of the CIA Cuba project (JMARC/JMATE) Robertson was brought back into CIA activities - primarily because of his long and close personal relationship with President Somoza. Somewhat surprisingly given his past "cowboy" history, Robertson was designated as the key American liaison to Somoza for the first Cuba Project. Robertson coordinated all JMATE activities in Nicaragua and was effectively in control of establishing and operating the CIA strike base established at Porta Cabezas in Nicaragua (JMTIDE).
Robertson was in Nicaragua from December, 1960 through mid-February 1961. He returned to Guatemala in April to sail with the Cuban Expeditionary Force and participate in the Bay of Pigs landings. He earned the respect of the Cuban volunteers by going ashore and fighting alongside them - against specific orders not to do so. His "hands on" reputation and his bond with the Cuban volunteers was enhanced by his personally leading maritime missions into Cuba for the CIA following the disaster at the Bay of Pigs. During those missions, he repeatedly violated standing orders; on one mission he directed his mission crew to conduct a machine gun attack on Che Guevara's residence. There was no CIA officer more respected and well regarded by Cuban anti-Castro fighters than Robertson, who always fought right along with them, regardless of orders.
Robertson died in Dallas in 1970 after overseas service in the Congo and Vietnam. Anecdotal stories, circa 1964 in the Congo, describe him as a separate source of information about the JFK attack in Dallas. He appears to have rather openly discussed the nature and motives for the assassination with his Cuban exile team in the Congo, a team which included several of his long time maritime mission personnel including Nestor Izquierdo.
Robertson is especially interesting to the JFK assassination given the missions he was involved with during the summer of 1963, including the TILT operation - a mission which violated a host of standard CIA security guidelines and involved a number of non-CIA authorized Cuban exiles, as well as civilians such as John Martino and former American ambassador William Pawley. The TILT mission (intended to obtain evidence that Russian missiles were still deployed inside Cuba) was approved by Western Hemisphere chief J.C. King, at the highest levels of the CIA - approved apparently without the knowledge of the Special Group, the NSC or RFK/JFK. If it had succeeded, the revelations would have been a tremendous political blow to the Kennedy administration. TILT included the participation of William Pawley, previously an American ambassador, earlier a secret Presidential liaison to the Batista regime and one of a very select group who had made an early, highly classified evaluation of American intelligence for President Eisenhower.
Rip Robertson and TILT
The TILT mission remains somewhat mysterious for many reasons, even though we do have documents on its origins and a detailed after action report from the operation's mission leader, Rip Robertson. Members of the DRE group floated rumors of missiles still being in Cuba during the winter of 1962. Following his release from a Cuban prison, that rumor was endorsed and promoted by John Martino through his media visibility and anti-Castro political contacts in Miami. The purported objective of the mission was to connect with a revolutionary group inside Cuba that was hiding four defecting Soviet missile technicians from Banes, Cuba.
The Russian technicians supposedly (according to the DRE sources) had remained in Cuba after the Soviet agreement to remove all missiles from the island. Supposedly, they were willing to provide statements and evidence that Soviet missiles - and possibly nuclear warheads - remained in Cuba. Arrangements were in put in place by William Pawley and Senate Internal Security committee chair James Eastland to immediately provide their information to Congressional and media sources in a manner that would have been highly damaging to the Kennedy Administration and JFK's upcoming election campaign.
What the available documents confirm is that the TILT mission was authorized at the level of the CIA's Western Hemisphere chief, J.C. King, and supported by Ted Shackley, the head of the JMWAVE station in Miami. It was approved and carried out at a point in time when all missions into Cuba required approval by the Special Group covert action oversight committee and Presidential concurrence. Yet there is no indication that TILT was communicated to the Special Group or approved by the president.
Besides Robertson, the CIA included experienced maritime paramilitary officers Rudy Enders and George "Mickey" Kappes. The CIA along with Anita Pawley secured "Max" as the translator. "Max" was CIA veteran Tony Sforza. Sforza was one of the CIA's principal agents in their stay behind network. This network remained in Cuba after the Bay of Pigs Invasion. Another principal agent of this network was Emilio Rodriguez. Henry Hecksher originally recruited Rodriguez in Cuba in 1960. Emilio Rodriguez's brother Arnesto Rodriguez was an early acquaintance of Lee Harvey Oswald in New Orleans and referred Oswald to his friend Carlos Bringuier, head of the local DRE group. [ ix ]
The TILT mission itself involved a host of violations of standard CIA security practices, including the participation of a LIFE magazine photojournalist. In addition, it involved the personal participation of William Pawley, a former US Ambassador. Beyond his work as an ambassador, Pawley had been a consultant on national security and the organization of the CIA, submitted an Eyes Only secret report on the national intelligence to President Eisenhower. TILT also involved the participation of a number of non-CIA vetted Cuban exiles involved with Commandos-L (a proscribed exile military group at that point in time) and of John Martino, recently released from prison in Cuba and a highly visible critic of the Kennedy Administration policies on Cuba.
In Rip Robertson's after action report to Ted (Shackley)/Bob (Moore), Robertson opined that the "inventors" plan for TILT differed from KUBARK's (CIA) version. Essentially, the "inventors" real plan was to assassinate Fidel Castro, and the CIA fell for the fake Soviet defectors story. Bob Moore was Shackley's Deputy Chief of Station and handled the JMWAVE maritime operations. Grayston Lynch told HSCA staffers that Moore was Chief of Operations for the invasion Task Force (Bay of Pigs) as well as Deputy PM and Chief of Operations for JMWAVE at one point. [ x ]
While speculative, Rip Robertson may also have been the CIA officer who was described by Rolando Otero in his remarks to House Select Committee on Assassinations investigator Gaeton Fonzi. Otero stated that to his personal knowledge a CIA officer had been circulating among certain Cuban exiles in the late summer/early fall of 1963 - making remarks that the U.S. was abandoning its support of the Cuban exiles and its efforts to oust the Castro regime. Otero himself was a personal friend of Nestor Izquierdo; both were members of Cuban exile parachute group. Otero blamed radical Cuban exiles for the murder of President Kennedy and provided Fonzi with the name of a local Cuban exile who purportedly had a broader knowledge of those involved - Bernardo de Torres.
Beyond Otero and his information about a CIA officer spreading the word against the Kennedy Administration and JFK in Miami another Miami local became quite public in remarks that the effort against Castro was being abandoned - due to a secret Kennedy accommodation with Castro.
While John Martino had aggressively and publicly tried to link Fidel Castro and Lee Oswald to a conspiracy against JFK in the weeks and months following the president's murder, decades later he admitted to close friends (shortly before his death) that he had been involved in a minor role in the conspiracy itself - including acting as a courier in trips to Dallas. He related his limited knowledge of both the plan for Dallas and the motives for those who were involved in the attack. His friends, first anonymously and then officially, relayed that information to the HSCA. In later years both his wife and his son confirmed that he had prior knowledge of the attack in Dallas and provided a limited amount of information as to whom he had been associating with in the period in which he had apparently become involved.
Martino independently supports other sources who described that the word had been spread among certain Cuban exiles in Miami that there was a secret JFK/Castro dialogue emerging. That fact can be confirmed by references which Martino made in speeches and writing, both prior to and following the assassination. He also admitted to the knowledge that Lee Oswald was being used in a relatively minor role in the conspiracy, pointing the attack on JFK towards Fidel Castro.
Speculation on Martino's sources, and who might have involved him in the conspiracy, seems to rest with individuals known to be Martino's most trusted associates in the September/October 1963 time frame. Certainly his most relevant anti-Castro activity, one quite surprising for a man his age, had been his personal participation in a Operation TILT, the highly secretive maritime mission into Cuba. Given mission leader Rip Robertson's operational role at JMWAVE, Martino would have been one of the few "outsiders" that Robertson would have been in contact with in the summer of 1963.
Beyond contact during the period of the mission into Cuba, Martino's son related that Rip Robertson was a frequent visitor to the Martino home during much of 1963, another definite violation of CIA security protocols. Other visitors included Felipe Vidal and Frank Sturgis (Fiorini). Both men circulated at will through the Cuban exile community.
Although Vidal was not a major exile "political" figure, he was well respected for his bravery, commitment and naval experience. During 1963 Vidal was operationally involved in ongoing efforts to stage independent paramilitary missions into Cuba with Roy Hargraves and Bernardo de Torres. Hargraves was photographed preparing for independent and unsanctioned boat missions, in the company of Bernardo de Torres and Felipe Vidal. However both Vidal and Hargraves were independent actors with extremely limited resources and certainly with no support from the CIA.
Significantly, Vidal himself related that he was aware of the fact that JFK was about to betray the Cuban exiles once again, negotiating some sort of accommodation with Fidel Castro - an accommodation that would leave Castro in power and abandon the Cuban exiles. Vidal described himself as having devoted effort to spreading the word within the exile community that JFK was actually a threat to them. It is also a matter of FBI record that, like Martino, Vidal himself did travel to Dallas during the fall of 1963.
In addition, Roy Hargraves was independently reported to the FBI as having known of and possibly as being involved in some fashion in a plot against JFK. Research has confirmed that Hargraves was the subject of the report to the FBI, and Hargraves himself confirmed (in a recorded interview with researcher Noel Twyman) that he and Vidal had been taken to Dallas in support of an action against the president.
Operational Names
Given their lack of direct association with CIA paramilitary operations, it seems unlikely that names such as Otero, Martino, Vidal or Hargraves would have come up during the conversations referred to by Gene Wheaton. However there are other names operationally associated with Felix Rodriquez, Rafael Quintero and Carl Jenkins that very likely might have surfaced during anti-Castro "war stories". In fact one of the few items of detail remarked on by Wheaton gives us a lead to such names. In later years, following his Contra era activities, Wheaton became acquainted with a journalist, Paul Hoven, and mentioned his experience with Jenkins and Quintero. Hoven has commented that Wheaton was circumspect and offered no extended details, but that he did comment that the people who carried out the attack on JFK had been Cuban exile volunteers who had been trained at a base in the south-east of Mexico. They had been trained to carry out assassinations, and ultimately those skills had been transferred from Cuban operations (with Fidel Castro as a likely target) to President Kennedy. [ xi ]
At the time neither Wheaton nor Hoven could have known that there was a group of very special Cuban exile volunteers that had indeed been trained - not inside south-east Mexico itself, but across the border in Guatemala. The training that those individuals received was quite special and it elevated them into unique missions against Cuba - both before and after the disaster at the Bay of Pigs. Several of those men were especially close to Cuban exile leader Manuel Artime, both before the Bay of Pigs and in a new Artime project which developed during 1963, a project under the oversight of Carl Jenkins and Rafael Quintero.
with President Kennedy
Manuel Artime Busa (crypt AMBIDDY-1) had been one of the Cuban exiles meeting with Senator John Kennedy as early as the Democratic Convention in July 1960; he became well acquainted with his brother Robert Kennedy. Artime became one of the more well-known Cuban exile political figures. Known widely inside Cuba for his anti-Batista activities, he became a highly symbolic figure in the American anti-Castro efforts. While the CIA would ultimately back away from the idea that a wide scale uprising against Castro was part of the plan for sending the Cuban Expeditionary Force on to the island at the Bay of Pigs, we now know that to be false. In fact, we know that their plans involved sending Artime into Cuba in advance, with special groups of pathfinders and scouts, to link up with active resistance groups on the island. A number of the personnel used in those infiltration teams, taken from the CIA's Guatemala camp, were as of January still under the command of Carl Jenkins. Others were taken from maritime operations teams (AMHAZE) which had been established at bases in the Florida Keys. One handpicked three-man infiltration team (Jorge Sotus, Carlos Hernandez and Jorge Giraud) staged out of Ramrod Key. [ xii ]
Beyond that there is strong reason to speculate that putting Artime and a total of four special teams into Cuba, in an operation approved directly by the CIA Director, was part of an initiative to assassinate Fidel Castro and trigger a general uprising which would have been climaxed by the arrival of the Cuban Expeditionary Force.
hundreds of 'crypts' used in Cuban operations and
other CIA activities
Under orders from CIA Director Helms, Artime and two special Cuban exile teams were sent under extremely high and compartmentalized security from Guatemala to Florida in early February, 1961. Seven team members were to personally accompany Artime. Members of the seven-man team included Nestor Izquierdo and Raul Villaverde. In addition, a separate three-man team traveled on the same transport aircraft, carefully isolated from Artime and his team. The three-man team was headed by Emilio Adolfo Rivero Caro (AMPANIC-7). Their goal was to deliver arms, blow up a central power plant and possibly assassinate Castro. Other members of Rivero's team were Jose Pujals Mederos (AMCOAX-1) and Alfredo Izaguirre Revoi (AMPUG-1). Izaguirre had previously plotted an assassination attempt of the Castro brothers after meeting with General Maxwell Taylor. This plot was most likely controlled by Commander Hal Feeney. Related documents suggest that prior to the actual mission teams proceeding into Cuba, Artime was to receive a special CIA headquarters briefing.
Beyond that we know of other covert military efforts to assassinate Castro. Projects again involving names becoming increasingly well known - Felix Rodriguez, Rafael Quintero and Carl Jenkins.
Castro Assassination Operations
We are far from having the full details of the extremely secret CIA paramilitary initiative which targeted Fidel Castro for assassination in early 1961. It is even unclear to what extent the heads of the Cuba Project and the CIA Director himself were informed as to the operational details of its various efforts. As with many areas of the overall Cuba Project, deniability and compartmentalization appears to have overruled effective communications and operational coordination. The best we can do is to detail some of the episodes now known to have occurred.
During the first three months of 1961 at least three different military missions were planned. Those missions targeted Cuban leaders and specifically Fidel Castro. They appear to have been inserted within a broader range of missions intended to contact on-island resistance groups in an effort to encourage sabotage and guerilla actions in support of the upcoming landings of the Cuban Expeditionary Force. One mission (possibly planned under the cover of "Pathfinder" operations in advance of the landings) was intended to carry out an attack on Fidel Castro at a location near the Bay of Pigs resort where he routinely vacationed. It appears that plan may have included details of Castro's personal travel and activities, including information from sources previously close to Castro inside Cuba such as Frank Sturgis (aka Fiorini). Prior to his departure from Cuba Sturgis had offered to personally carry out a lethal attack on Castro, however the CIA had declined his offer at that point in time. Sturgis's name appears in one January 20, 1961 report which includes a reference to "Pathfinder".
at what is now the site of the Miami Zoo
A second plan - known to Carl Jenkins, if not directly managed by him - did go operational; it involved the insertion of personnel who were to carry out a well-planned sniper attack on Fidel Castro at his retreat on Varadero Beach, east of Havana. The mission was supported with maps and annotated drawings of the Varadero (formerly DuPont-owned) Estate. Those materials were prepared from aerial and possibly satellite photo imagery processed by the imagery staff assigned to JMWAVE. We only know about these two assassination projects because certain of the WAVE personnel were later transferred to the National Photo Imagery Center (NPIC) and they provided information to the Church Committee investigating assassinations. The very limited records which describe the two plans were submitted to the Church Committee by managers at NPIC; they included statements from some eight personnel who had worked on projects related to attacks on Castro.
According to Edward Cates, the chief of the Image Exploitation Group at NPIC, "a number of our photo interpreters [8 individuals] supported Carl Jenkins of the DD/P (Deputy Directorate of Plans) concerning a plan to assassinate Castro at the DuPont Varadero Beach Estate, east of Havana. Castro was known to frequent the estate and the plan was to use a high powered rifle in the attempt. The photo interpretation support was restricted to providing annotated photographs and line drawings of the estate."
It appears that the CIA may have performed its own internal investigation of those missions in the mid-1970s. Two memoranda from June and August, 1975 record the statement of a Cuban CIA officer (in 1961 a contract employee) that he participated in three abortive Cuban infiltration missions, including an effort to land him near Varadero Beach. The objective of that mission was a long range rifle attack on Fidel Castro. One of the memos mentions the names of two Cubans involved in the mission, "Felix" and "Segundo". Based on this information, it appears that Carl Jenkins may have been transferred out of Guatemala to manage a number of covert infiltration missions, involving at least one which involved Felix Rodriquez and a sniper attack on Fidel Castro.
The "Segundo" mentioned in the CIA document is Segundo BORGES Ransola. Felix Rodriquez verified Segundo's identity and role in the Castro assassination project in an interview many years later - stating that both he and Segundo trained in Panama and then were asked to volunteer for the infiltrations. Rodriquez noted that both he and Segundo were only 19 years old when they entered training in the Panama camp and then were prepared and sent on special missions into Cuba prior to the Bay of Pigs. In the summer of 1963, Segundo Borges joined Manual Artime for a recruiting trip to Fort Benning, Georgia. The stated goal was to recruit men for a new combat effort based out of offshore camps. Although Borges was initially identified as one of Artime's aides at the "Nicaraguan Revolutionary Training Camp" his real role was leader of the AMWORLD maritime infiltration team. [ xiii ] During a November, 1963 recruiting visit to Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Borges reportedly told trainees that Artime had money to buy arms and ships and many places where he could establish a training base.
A CIA memo also discloses that the boat used for the special mission into Cuba, the "yacht", had aborted one insertion due to engine problems. That observation, when combined with information in related documents, allows us to identify the yacht as the Tejana III and the individual named Felix as Felix Rodriquez. CIA documents record the missions of the Tejana III, which began in late February, 1961 and ended in early April. The Tejana made four trips into Cuba during that period, carrying infiltration personnel and supplies for on island groups intended to support the planned uprising. Some 27 personnel and 60 tons of supplies were covertly transported into Cuba. It appears that Felix Rodriquez was sent in on a one-man mission in early April, a mission which was forced to abort due to an engine problem with the Tejana III. [ xiv ]
A separate CIA document, the debriefing of Felix Rodriquez prior to his separation from the CIA in 1976 (and a very unusual authorization for the public disclosure of his CIA service), records his own statement that in December 1960 he had volunteered to kill Fidel Castro, stating that it was the only solution to the Cuban problem. He also stated that he had been supplied with a special sniper weapon for missions into Cuba and that he and another CIA Cuban had made three missions into Cuba. [ xv ]
Rodriquez did not identify the CIA officer who had given them the assignments or state any details on the missions. In his own biography, Rodriquez provides more detail on the assassination plan, describing a German bolt action sniper rifle with a telescopic sight. The rifle itself was pre-sighted according to the specifics of the mission, based on the exact location in which Castro was to be attacked.
While we have a good level of detail on the abortive sniper attack involving Felix Rodriquez, the earlier mission - apparently scheduled for March - remains far more mysterious. However, we do know that Richard Helms himself approved the transportation and staging of four different teams that apparently were scheduled for missions in the March time frame, missions which either aborted or failed. One of the teams would have involved Manuel Artime, another a special three-man mission which ultimately failed in a major sabotage attempt on the Havana power system - as well as the planned assassination of Castro. While characterized to the Church Committee as a rogue operation, that effort clearly was sanctioned and involved a three-man team sent out of Guatemala by Carl Jenkins.
At the same time, another team consisting of 7 exile personnel and two deniable team leaders was also sent out of Guatemala. Interestingly, one of the team leaders may have been one of the Russian defectors who had been used for Cuban exile military training in both Panama and Guatemala. That possibility is indicated by the fact that a CIA document indicates him as associated with AEDEPOT. The AE crypt can be shown to be used for Soviet Union sources, in particular defectors and agents.
For reference, it should also be noted that the CIA's efforts to use Havana casino connections to poison Fidel Castro did not get underway before March 1961. The first effort failed and a second effort was hurriedly put together in early April, immediately prior to the dispatch of the Cuban Expeditionary Force. That effort aborted because the conduit for the poison, Tony Varona, was sequestered along with other exile political leaders immediately before Brigade 2506 sailed from Guatemala. President Eisenhower's initial timeframe for putting exile forces into Cuba would have inserted them prior to the November, 1960 elections. When that failed he requested that the CIA carry out an operation in December. However, the CIA's plan had changed so dramatically over time that even the basic missions in support of an internal uprising in Cuba - much less the actual elimination of Fidel Castro - were not operational prior to January, 1960.
Other Names
By this point the names - Carl Jenkins, Rafael Quintero and very likely Felix Rodriquez - directly related to Gene Wheaton and the war stories he was privy to are becoming familiar. However those three individuals were also operationally associated with a number of other persons of interest in regard to the stories being told, from the earliest covert operations against Cuba and Fidel Castro to the newest CIA project which was coming into being in the fall of 1963 at the time of the attack on JFK. Given their operational history, their demonstrated skills, and the possibility that one or more of their names might have been included in the conversations between Jenkins, Quintero, and Rodriquez, it seems worthwhile to turn our attention to those names, and to the activities of those individuals in 1963.
What all of them had in common as of fall 1963 is that they were becoming involved with a new and highly deniable CIA operation designated as AMWORLD, an operation headed on the CIA side by Carl Jenkins (operations and logistics) and Henry Hecksher (political action operational deniability) and on the Cuban exile side by Rafael Quintero (operations and logistics) and Manual Artime (political action and public relations).
Hecksher had previously served with the CIA in Berlin, Guatemala, Laos, and Tokyo as well as on the Cuba projects - including special missions to Mexico City in 1962. Hecksher's second in command was Carl Jenkins. Jenkins had prior service across SE Asia including Laos and Indonesia, as well as in training the initial Cuba project Cubans in Panama along with Glen "Rocky" Farnsworth, who was involved with running pre-invasion maritime missions into Cuba out of CIA bases in the Florida Keys. Although it is not possible to be specific on their assignments, at least one of those individuals appears likely to have been associated with a new element of the AMWORLD project, a renewed effort to assassinate Fidel Castro (AMTHUG).
Given that the Artime project was to be exceptionally deniable and highly autonomous, associates of Artime and the Cuban exile project personnel became directly involved in field activities without direct CIA officer supervision or involvement - to an extent never seen in previous CIA projects. Working under the umbrella of Desmond Fitzgerald's new Special Affairs Staff, Hecksher and Jenkins and a very small CIA staff provided AMWORLD support including the provision of false identities and travel paperwork (required to covertly exfiltrate them outside the United States) as well as business and employment covers. At this point only two other CIA officers are known to have been involved in the early months of AMWORLD operations; they will be identified and discussed later in this research paper.
Among the first of the Cuban exiles to join the AMWORLD project were Segundo Borges - serving as Artime's primary recruiter - and Felix Rodriquez, personally recruited for AMWORLD by Artime and Borges. However, Artime quickly brought in a number of individuals with whom he had worked in the anti-Castro resistance inside Cuba. Those men had been among the very first to volunteer for the CIA's original anti-Castro effort and had participated in a number of Cuban infiltration missions.
It is significant that prior participation in independent and unsanctioned maritime missions against Cuba or in illegal activities involving violations of U.S. federal statutes did not prevent individuals from being taken into Artime's operation. In fact, several individuals being investigated by the FBI as of August, 1963 were taken into the AMWORLD project during the next three months. That represented a dramatic break with prior exile activities sponsored by the CIA, where all personnel were security screened prior to any assignments.
One of the earliest 1963 AMWORLD recruits was Carlos "Batea" Hernandez Sanchez (Cuban Brigade trainee 2523). Carlos was personally close to Artime, having been a member of Artime's "Commandos Rurales" in Cuba, along with Nestor Izquierdo and Rafael Quintero. Hernandez was a black belt in judo and a sharpshooter. It was his expertise in judo and his friendship with Artime that had led Artime to request Hernandez as his personal bodyguard while traveling in Latin America early in 1960. Carlos had also been one of the first volunteers for the CIA's Cuba project - receiving training as part of a small number of exiles to be inserted into Cuba. Their mission would be to join on-island resistance groups, stimulating guerrilla activities and triggering a counter-revolution against the Castro regime.
Carlos Hernandez began his CIA paramilitary training under Carl Jenkins at the CIA's Panama camp (JMRYE). Training included infantry combat, guerrilla operations, and sabotage as well as radio communications. Following training in Panama, Hernandez was moved into an advanced group, ultimately receiving special training in the use of explosives and infiltration skills, at a CIA camp operated outside Belle Chasse, Louisiana (JMMOVE). [ xvi ] A number of the earliest Cuban exile volunteers went through Panama training and moved on to Belle Chase - that list includes Nestor Izquierdo, Carlos Hernandez, Victor Espinosa Hernandez, Jorge Giraud, and Frank Bernardino. Those individuals were then "sheep dipped" as malcontents and officially taken out of the program - instead they were actually moved into safe houses and then into Cuba infiltration missions (AMHINT, AMHAZE, etc.) managed out of the CIA's base in the Florida Keys (JMFIG). [ xvii ]
While many of these maritime missions remain to be explored, we do know details of one involving an AMHAZE team, a team involving Carlos Hernandez and designated as Operation Yeast. That mission was to launch from Ramrod Key with the assistance of the MDC and connect with DRE resistance elements and stimulate an uprising in Cuba's Oriente Province. Another of its team members, Luis Sierra, would also join AMWORLD, becoming chief of its commandos. As with several of the missions associated with stimulating on-island resistance to Castro, Operation Yeast apparently aborted due to Castro military forces in the intended landing area. Other operations (PEPE, PATRICIO and GORDO) sent in teams including Carlos Hernandez and Jorge Giraud (AMHAZE-2524) to contact and coordinate with DRE resistance groups - all those missions aborted, reportedly compromised by Cuban counter intelligence.
The Cuban exiles involved with these teams and missions remained fervent anti-Castro activists, several participated in further JMWAVE maritime missions through 1962 and even following the Cuban missile crisis. However, with the public agreement between the Kennedy Administration and the Soviets, the number and aggressiveness of those maritime missions significantly decreased as the months went on in 1963. By the summer many of the early volunteers were separated from ongoing JMWAVE activity.
Some who were also DRE and AMHAZE members were placed on a retainer and held as an inactive DRE military reserve. DRE itself had been receiving CIA payments since prior to the Bay of Pigs although its primary role was supposed to be propaganda and political action. However, the DRE members were generally young, notoriously hard to control and eager to go into combat against Castro. After his release from post-Bay of Pigs JMWAVE maritime missions, Carlos Hernandez became a very active DRE member, part of its military leadership and a trainer for DRE infiltration teams. He was a participant in a dramatic and internationally publicized DRE boat raid on Havana in August, 1962.
By the summer of 1963 DRE activists such as Carlos Hernandez and John Koch Gene (whose brother had died at the Bay of Pigs landings) had been out of JMWAVE maritime operations for months.
Clearly frustrated by inaction, and part of an organization that was continually seeing its request for combat operations rejected by the CIA, several of the DRE members began to initiate their own projects - attempting to buy weapons, to set up an offshore base of their own and as private funding allowed, participating in plans for their own strikes against Cuba.
Coming Together in 1963
regarding seizure of explosives
DRE (AMSPELL) affiliations and their common training and operational experiences brought several of these men back together in July and August of 1963, first in a plan to launch bombing attacks from Florida and then in a more ambitious plan to actually assemble a large quantity of bombs and stage a two-plane bombing raid on Cuba. Surplus bomb cases were purchased, dynamite was bought from a source in Illinois and it was all carried to a rural area outside New Orleans (LaCombe Louisiana) for assembly. When the bombs were ready, the B-26's were to fly in (reportedly from the Houston Texas area), stop only briefly for weapons loading, and be on their way.
The Cuban exiles participating in both these summer, 1963 projects were Student Directorate (DRE) members, and the financing for their efforts reportedly came from former Havana casino figures, primarily from Mike McClaney, via Sam Benton. The FBI conducted an extensive investigation of the bombing efforts (the FBI summary report runs to 112 pages) but in the end no charges or other legal actions were taken against any of those involved. The effort had been quite serious, involving a massive amount of material, some 48 cartons of dynamite alone plus other bomb making materials. Enough so that after the FBI raid confiscated them the materials had to be housed in a military storage depot for explosives.
The dynamite intended for the bombs had been obtained from a long time explosives and weapons dealer in Illinois, (Richard Lauchli) with a history of selling to Cuban exile groups including the DRE.
Explosives and other materials for the abortive bombing project had been obtained in Illinois, where DRE members had been traveling in the summer and fall of 1963, seeking weapons for new military activities. By that point in time the Kennedy Admiration was opposing any of their military missions and supporting them only in public relations and propaganda activities.
Several of the names in the LaCombe project are familiar from Cuban maritime operations and the special group requested by Manuel Artime for his Cuba Project commando operations. They include Carlos Hernandez, Victor Espinosa Hernandez and John Koch Gene (AMHINT-26) as well as Frank Bernardino and Antonio Soto. Both Soto and Herrera had flown Brigade 2506 aircraft in support of the Bay of Pigs landings. At the time of the project, Soto was on leave following a six-month tour of duty in the CIA-organized Makasi air group operating in the Congo. He would return for a second tour at the end of November, 1963.
John Koch Gene, Carlos Hernandez and Victor Espinosa Hernandez had met with Mike McClaney as part of the bombing project and McClaney was identified by the FBI as the source of funding for what was essentially a DRE rogue mission. Details of the LaCombe project and the FBI's investigation are included as Appendix C in this paper.
What the Miami and LaCombe plans illustrate is that several of the more activist, independent exiles had begun coming together as the CIA's JMWAVE missions slacked off in 1963 and as the Kennedy Administration began to push the FBI and even the CIA to begin interdicting any missions against Cuba from the continental United States. There was a growing sense of frustration and even hostility within much of the Cuban exile community. During April, 1963 the head of the Cuban Revolutionary Council resigned, with harsh words for the Kennedy Administration, claiming that JFK had promised the exiles another invasion but had instead settled on a course of peaceful coexistence with Fidel Castro.
Beginning in the spring of 1963, FBI activities in Miami, Chicago, New Orleans and Dallas escalated, with surveillance on exile groups and camps as well as stings intended to abort attempts at purchases of explosives and weapons. During the course of the year, efforts to form new independent exile movements inside the United States launched and then floundered by the end of the year. The DRE had received some level of funding and support from the CIA with its leaders and a small military group on retainer; it had even received some amount of weapons and ammunition and encouraged to perform military training. But following the disaster at the Bay of Pigs, DRE members had become harshly critical of the CIA, blaming the U.S. for deserting them and even offering threats against CIA personal.
The CIA found itself increasingly unable to control DRE's independent military activities and by the end of 1962 DRE had become aware that the U. S. was pressuring the Dominican Republic to shut down the group's missions launched from that country. Internal CIA reports described the DRE as being the most bitter of all exile groups towards JFK and his policies, and in April the DRE officially advised the CIA that it "could no longer operate under the restrictions of U.S. policy". The DRE's own leaders had become quite public in proclaiming that the United States had deserted them and that they would need to fight own entirely at their own, harshly criticizing the betrayal of the Kennedy Administration.
Such harsh words about JFK, perhaps more strongly expressed, were repeated in Dallas. A visiting DRE member from Dallas spoke so harshly about the Kennedys - remarking that "they" would take care of Kennedy one way or the other when came to Dallas - that when he realized he was being taped he literally threatened the individual (stating that he held a black belt) with the tape in order to retrieve it.
Later, following the attack on President Kennedy in Dallas, his recollections of the climate and remarks being passed within the DRE led one CIA officer who had worked on the Cuba Project in Miami - and who was familiar with a number if the DRE members - to formally suggest that the DRE should be investigated in regard to the President's assassination.
By mid-1963 the DRE was increasingly involved in soliciting private funding from virtually anyone, in weapons purchasing efforts and in attempts to organize its only independent military activities. The organization would continue to request CIA support for its military operations, but by October it was receiving increasingly negative responses and ultimately it would be made very clear that DRE's military activities would not be tolerated.
and DRE contact with Oswald
The lack of any ongoing DRE military operations, along with the dramatic cut in JMWAVE maritime operations against Cuba, left many of the most experienced Cuban covert operations personnel with literally no options to continue their struggle against the Castro regime. It was at this point in time we find DRE members such as Victor Espinosa Hernandez, Carlos Hernandez and John Koch Gene reaching out to their former maritime action associates to involve them in projects such as the LaCombe air mission.
However even before the FBI investigation of that effort had been completed, while several of the individuals involved were still under investigation, a brand new opportunity opened up for them and we find several of the other names with which we have now become familiar being recruited into a brand new CIA project - AMWORLD. The group that came together in AMWORLD, under Artime and Quintero, was first recruited inside the U.S. beginning in the summer of 1963. We know that it included DRE members involved in the LaCombe project including Carlos Hernandez, John Koch Gene (AMHINT-26), Antonio Soto and Gonzolo Herrera. Other recruits included Felix Rodriquez, Nestor Izquierdo, Jorge Giraud, Luis Sierra and Antonio Iglesias Pons. Quintero and Iglesias Pons would eventually become the individuals responsible for the AMWORLD camps.
The exact locations and movements of the personnel recruited into AMWORLD in the fall of 1963 remain hazy; we do know there were funds made available for activities inside the United States such as lodging, travel and even the purchase of supplies and weapons. We also know that some training was conducted; as an example Felix Rodriquez reportedly trained 30 people on communications equipment and practices. Other documents suggest that some personnel may have undergone training at Camp Stanley, outside San Antonio Texas. Camp Stanley (referred to as the "Midwest Depot") served as a secret storage depot for CIA weapons, explosives and other equipment from the time of the Cuba project, through AMWORLD and into the 1970s, supplying material for CIA covert operations in Angola and later in support of the Contra-era activities in Nicaragua.
During the Cuba Project Camp Stanley conducted some local training (apparently on communications equipment) and also supplied materials used to support the training which was conducted at Belle Chase - when that training concluded the materials were returned to the "Midwest Depot".
There is documentation suggesting that AMWORLD may have sourced explosives from Camp Stanley. Given the indications of covert military training at the base, it is certainly possible that some of the personnel receiving advanced training for Cuban operations or for AMWORLD did spend time at Camp Stanley. That seems especially interesting given that one of the few details that Gene Wheaton related was that he had heard that some of the individuals involved in the Dallas attack had trained in Texas.
One of the AMWORLD project's most distinctive aspects was that unlike earlier CIA operations only a handful of CIA staff were involved. Two of the only officers involved at all in its field operations became so concerned by its management and security that they offered to be removed from the assignment. Key Cuban volunteer personnel were allowed to rotate from camps offshore back to Miami and gossip and rumors about AMWORLD were rife. In the end the general knowledge about AMWORLD within select portions of the Cuban community became comparable to that which had preceded the landing of the Cuban Expeditionary Force at the Bay of Pigs.
Off the Grid
We do know the names of a number of the AMWORLD recruits of August/September 1963, including several of those who would have been well known operationally to Jenkins, Quintero and Felix Rodriquez. Virtually all those individuals essentially went out of sight during the last quarter of the year.....including Rodriquez himself. The names - Carlos Hernandez, Nestor Izquierdo, John Koch Gene, Jorge Navarro - begin to reappear in the records only in January and February of 1964, in camps in Nicaragua and Costa Rica. It appears that recruits from the DRE were covertly exfiltrated "black" via an AKL ship called the Joanne and via a "chartered" DC-3. Most of them ended up in Costa Rica, either at Camp Guillot or at a camp near Puerto Viejo near the Panamanian border.
Documents from 1964 reveal several of the key leaders serving under Artime and Quintero. Sixto Mesa handled the group's finances while Quintero had overall charge of the camps as Deputy Chief. The number three man and the individual actually in the field, serving as the military leader running the camps, was Antonio Iglesias Pons. He had been a prisoner in Cuba, taken during the Bay of Pigs landings and was one of the first of the group to go outside the U.S., to Nicaragua in December, 1963. Later, friends would remark that Iglesias Pons had talked of knowing something about the conspiracy that killed JFK.
Segundo Borges, a veteran of the earliest CIA Castro assassination missions and lead recruiter for Artime in the AMWORLD project, became the operations commando team leader. Luis Sierra Lopez, who apparently received some form of early training in Texas, was also a commando team leader.
Felix Rodriquez appears in the AMWORLD documents, but strangely (given his extensive covert operations experience) never in paramilitary activities - only in communications training and management. The first record of any actual AMWORLD operations appears to be the dispatch of a commando team - designated as Black Nine - to covertly depart the United States on a ship (the Joanne) which was being leased for equipment transport. The ship was sailing out of Baltimore and one hold had been converted to secretly house the team when the ship sailed. The team actually boarded the ship on November 27, remaining under cover on board. Due to apparent fitting and crew problems the ship did not actually sail until December 1, then had problems at sea. Apparently this activity was so sensitive that it was under overview by the CIA Director.
In spite of the high priority for deniability and covert operations, during 1964 and 1965 the project maintained a relatively large office and staff in Miami, even allowing its field leaders like Iglesias to travel back and forth between its bases and Miami on a fairly routine basis. This led to a great number of leaks, compromised operational security and in the end totally frustrated CIA officers assigned to the project. More details in regard to the AMWORLD project are provided in Appendix B of this paper.
What seems missing in all the 1963/64 documentation on AMWORLD are the activities of what would seem to be its most experienced and operationally skilled members. While Carlos Hernandez, Nestor Izquierdo, John Koch Gene, and Jorge Navarro all appear to have gone to Nicaragua, they do not show up as military leaders in the project nor even in operations. It seems strange that individuals such as they, and Felix Rodriquez - selected for something as highly secret as a Castro assassination project, demonstrably skilled in both infiltration and exfiltration and trusted by the seasoned CIA paramilitary officers such as Rip Robertson - would go off the grid, and stay off the grid, out of any significant AMWORLD operations or activities.
One More Lead
Although it most definitely did not come from Gene Wheaton, there is one lead which appears to connect certain of the individuals associated with the AMWORLD project to inside knowledge of the Kennedy assassination. First uncovered by an English author/researcher decades ago, it has taken even more years to fully vet and potentially connect. Only now is it possible to speculate on that lead, which in itself might define the "circle" of individuals involved in the actual Dallas attack.
Wayne January operated an aircraft servicing and sales company at Red Bird airport in Dallas. [ xviii ] During 1963 he was involved with a small number of multi-engine transport aircraft which were being sold to a third party company associated with the Houston Air Center. January was responsible for servicing, checking and making any fixes required by the buyers who were accepting the aircraft. The last aircraft being sold was actually a WWII troop carrier which had been heavily modified, having all the seats removed and reconfigured as a cargo carrier.
Early in the week of November 22, 1963, two individuals arrived to take receipt of the last aircraft. One was an American, who left immediately and only returned that Friday. The second was Latino; he essentially accepted the aircraft, overseeing any corrective maintenance work which was required. The Cuban spent the week working alongside January.
While the aircraft was being accepted, the pilot/aircraft mechanic conducting the acceptance identified himself as a Cuban (he spoke English with no particular accent) who had previously flown similar aircraft in Cuba. He had joined the Cuban Expeditionary Force as a pilot and had flown at the Bay of Pigs (both B-26 fighter bombers and parachute troop transports were involved in support of the landings). The Cuban told January that he was familiar with the type of aircraft which was being accepted and had flown similar planes as an officer in the Cuban Air Force. Later he mentioned that the American who had arrived with him to take possession of the aircraft was a Colonel in the U.S. Air Force. The American had departed Red Bird immediately after arrival and did not appear again until around mid-day on November 22.
The Cuban became comfortable after talking with January over several days, and was outspoken in relating that his friends had died during the Bay of Pigs landings - because JFK had not delivered the promised air cover for them. Talk of the President coming to Dallas apparently agitated the Cuban and he stated to January that JFK would be killed in revenge for his comrades' deaths. January felt the man to be quite sincere but that he was simply exaggerating. No more was said about the subject until the afternoon of November 22. January talked to the Cuban for a few moments after the assassination of JFK and was told that things were happening just as he had been told. In the shock and excitement of the afternoon January did not talk to the American again nor did he actually observe the aircraft depart or observe who was in it.
Nothing about the pilot's remarks indicates he was directly involved in the Dallas attack; he had been there working on the aircraft's checking and acceptance since Nov. 18. It does suggest that he was associating with individuals - his "friends" - who were talking about JFK in terms of betrayal and revenge. His remarks reveal the same motives overheard by Wheaton and independently related by Martino, Otero and Vidal - that revenge was the motive and that to those involved, JFK's death was a matter of executing a traitor.
At this time virtually all the details of January's story have been researched and confirmed. The aircraft in question was real and it was sent off to a firm in Houston, remaining on its books for two years until it was ultimately turned over to a Mexican air transport company. [ xix ] As with the Wheaton incident, the question becomes whether the pilot's remarks can be associated with any particular group of individuals. With what we now know it appears highly likely the aircraft was destined for AMWORLD project.
While speculative, it is also possible that the Cuban pilot was someone quite familiar to us by now. While AMWORLD was to be focused on deniable attack missions against Cuba from offshore locations - making it almost entirely a maritime effort - it did require limited air transport and a small number of pilots were brought into the project. A small number of pilots were recruited for AMWORLD; one of them was Antonio Soto, the individual involved in examining the bombs to be built for the Lacombe Louisiana bombing plan previously discussed. Documents reveal that Soto had previously been in the Cuban Air Force; he was recruited into the Brigade and had flown a B-26 in support of the Bay of Pigs landings. Beyond that, CIA documents reveal that he spoke very good English. And somewhat strangely, after flying at the Bay of Pigs, Soto was recruited into JMWAVE maritime operations in October 1962 - at the height of the missile crisis. He was then recruited from those missions into the new CIA Congo air operations (Makasi), beginning his first six-month tour there in November, 1962.
Another AMWORLD pilot was Jorge Navarro. Although Navarro was a pilot and had been in training in the Cuban Air Force before going into exile, he did not fly for the Cuban Expeditionary Force but rather was assigned to paramilitary operations. His experience in unarmed combat and in sharpshooting appears to have qualified him for assignment to the special group of individuals inserted into Cuba prior to the Brigade 2506 landings. Navarro was part of a 15-man team that included Carlos Hernandez and the previously mentioned Luis Sierra. [ xx ] The record indicates that his insertion was operationally conducted by Rip Robertson.
Navarro was recruited into the Artime project in August, 1963 and served in it as a pilot until 1965, at which time he and many other members were recruited by the CIA for special operations in the Congo. Navarro stated that he was one of the pilots that flew C-47s in Nicaragua for the Artime project. Antonio Soto was also recruited for CIA air operations in the Congo. His stay in Nicaragua was very brief and he never actually flew for AMWORLD before transferring to the Congo. His second Congo tour was from the end of 1963 until May 1964.
Another possible candidate for the AMWORLD mechanic/pilot/navigator is Mario Ginebra-Groero. Ginebra was known as "Chiqui" Ginebra during the Bay of Pigs operation. His first tour of the Congo was during the first part of 1963 where he partnered with Rene Garcia and flew with Antonio Soto. The exact date of his assignment to the AMWORLD project is not known, but he was the C-47 navigator as noted in an AMWORLD report of 11/29/63. His brother Francisco also applied to join the AMWORLD project but was given a six month cooling off period because he had just returned from a tour in the Congo.
While there is no way that we can determine the exact identity of the Cuban pilot who told Wayne January that his friends were planning to kill JFK in revenge for his treachery, it is true that Soto fully matches the description and remarks related by January. We even know that Soto's English skills were excellent, both reading and speaking. Later he would translate a diary belonging to Che Guevera during the CIA Cuban force's actions against Cuban military units led by Che in the Congo.
While equally speculative, it is quite possible that the American who arrived with the Cuban was a CIA officer whose duties and known travel exactly fit the time frame for an appearance to accept an aircraft in Dallas.
U.S. Air Force Lt. Colonel Manny Chavez, pseudonym Russell Sambora and alias Manuel Gomez (Major Gomez) aka "the Mexican", was assigned from JMWAVE to support the AMWORLD effort in October 29, 1963. He had been at JMWAVE with David Morales on the Cuba project since 1960. He and Morales had previously served in Venezuela together before assignment to the JMMATE project. Chavez had trained as a pilot and flew during World War II with the Army Air Force. During the Korean conflict he was called back to active duty and received training at the U.S. Army Counterintelligence School. In early October 1963, he was a member of the USAF interrogation team.
Chavez's roles in the early months of AMWORLD were threefold. He assisted with the logistics of moving major pieces of equipment and shipments of weapons for the project, he appears to have done some contact work to set up the logistics for the project's air support and he was directly charged with monitoring and reporting on the operational security of the project. While details on his work are limited at present, we do know that Chavez traveled to help organize activities in the early days of the project, and that his travel included at least one trip to Mexico City where he was scheduled to arrive by November 25. On that trip he was to contact both David Phillips and officers from the Mexican Air Force. More details on his work and reports are contained in documents referenced in Appendix C.
Directions for Further Research
then-Marine Carl Jenkins, who
remains 'in the background' of
these stories.
It's unlikely that we will ever be able to definitively identify the individuals that Quintero, Jenkins and likely Felix Rodriquez mentioned in their war story sessions (or to know if they even named them or used true names). It also appears that Wheaton heard little in the way of details; if any "true" names were mentioned in the talk sessions he certainly was unwilling to share them - and they may have meant nothing to him at the time. It's a terrific challenge to explore the names connected to Jenkins and Quintero - even with the new resources we now have available. Thirty years ago it would have been virtually impossible for a single individual to connect the dots even in the speculative manner that we have done in this working paper. Yet there is more research that can be done.
1) Obviously one of the most important steps would be to identify the source for Quintero's sensational quote, as cited in his obituary. If that could be vetted and explored it would directly contradict any dismissive remarks which Carl Jenkins has offered over the years in regard to Gene Wheaton.
There is also a good deal more that could be done to flesh out the material in this research paper and possibly to corroborate certain portions. Certainly if Manny Chavez could be located and interviewed about his first months with AMWORLD, it could be a game changer. If he did travel to Dallas, and if he did remember the Cuban's name, that would be explosive.
2) Beyond that, further details on what the AMWORLD volunteers were doing in October and November is critical. If they were "off the grid" and just waiting, with time on their hands and the ability to travel to Dallas, it leaves open the possibility of a true rogue action on their parts. Felix Rodriquez bragged about how at times he fooled his own CIA case officers in order to take private jobs, even traveling overseas with them having no idea of his movements.
3) There remains an open question as to whether information shared among select Cuba Project mission cadre could have been related to the reported appearance of Cubans associating with Lee Oswald in Texas in the fall of 1963. As an example, in early 1961, Carlos Hernandez served on a handpicked infiltration team with Jorge Sotus. The two men, both early MRR members inside Cuba, spent considerable time together in advance of the mission. Sotus had been one of the founders of MRR inside Cuba along with Manual Artime. As a senior MRR military officer Sotus worked with an American (Robert McKeown) in smuggling arms into Cuba for the revolution against Batista. Sotus was among those charged with neutrality violations for the smuggling, when McKeown was arrested for his weapons dealings.
When Sotus managed to escape from prison on the Isle of Pines, he made his way to Miami and he too joined the CIA project. Both men had a lengthy history with MRR and with Artime and when a plan to insert Artime into Cuba to stimulate on-island resistance was developed, Sotus specifically requested Hernandez to be part of a select three-man team to be inserted into Cuba in advance of Artime's return. The Sotus/Hernandez relationship is especially interesting in that MeKeown related that he had previously encountered the man who had accompanied Lee Oswald in a visit in which they attempted to buy weapons and a high caliber, scope-equipped rifle. He remembered that man as someone involved with his earlier weapons smuggling into Cuba, but could only recall a last name, "Hernandez".
4) What was Rip Robertson actually doing after TILT and before heading off to the Congo in 1964? Was he free enough to contact and organize an attack team for Dallas? We know our persons of interest would have trusted him operationally; did he take advantage of that? Where are the JMWAVE records on him for that fall?
5) The same goes for the JMWAVE maritime staff like Izquierdo; were there no missions to send him on? Ditto for Felix Rodriquez. Documents show that officially Rodriquez's only operational role was to conduct communications equipment training for 30 men - yet another document reveals that the 14 radio sets intended for AMWORLD never left Miami and after AMWORLD ended, Artime was trying to sell them. There remains a real question as to what any of the AMWORLD recruits were doing prior to leaving the U.S. in January/February, 1964.
6) Just where did those AMWORLD recruits go in October/November, 1963? Was it to Texas and Camp Stanley? Or did they just stay at home in Miami? Interestingly enough, we know that Carlos Hernandez and others were used in DRE political activities; did they go to Dallas? Were they involved in any way with Lee Oswald?
And of course there is the mystery of the Black Nine team. Some 9 combat team members were sent to Philadelphia to exifiltrate via the boat outbound for Costa Rica - but documents also show that 9 Cuban exile crew from the boat resigned and somehow made their way back to Miami before the boat sailed. That appears not to have raised any concern or discussion - from an operational security view it certainly should have and Manny Chavez should have been up in arms about it. How did the crew get replaced so quickly? Or was something more sinister in play in this apparent personnel shuffle?
We would like to thank Bill Simpich for his advice, research and the work that he has done with crypt identification and the posting of his research at the Mary Ferrell website. Crypt identification has been critical to being able to read and understand the documents cited in our research.
Appendix A: Backgrounds and Context
Carl Jenkins
Jenkins began his military service during WWII, following the war he was commissioned as a Second Lt. in a Reserve Rifle Company (1950) and became an instructor for the CIA in 1952, teaching courses in paramilitary operations, survival and Evasion and Escape during 1952 and 1953. During the 1950s he conducted training across SE Asia, including training Thai and Nationalist Chinese personnel and served in Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia. His specialties included maritime infiltration and guerrilla/resistance tactics.
In 1960 Jenkins (CIA pseudonym James D. Zaboth) was assigned to the CIA's Cuba project (JMATE) in 1960/61, placed in charge of training of Cuban exiles and expatriates. The initial training work was carried out at a CIA camp in Panama. From Panama, Jenkins was assigned to develop a much larger training facility in Guatemala, where he served as Chief of Base for the ground forces training there (JMTRAV). In February, Jenkins was reassigned, apparently to run a variety of highly covert infiltration missions into Cuba, missions related to preparing the way inside Cuba for the landing forces. He was associated with the abortive effort to move Artime and special teams into Cuba in March, and appears to have been involved with the covert efforts to send in personnel to carry out attacks against Fidel Castro in early April.
Following the failed landings at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961, Jenkins was sent to Vietnam, where he served as a special warfare advisor to I Corps in the northernmost region of South Vietnam, operating out of DaNang. In 1963 Jenkins was assigned to a new project, designated AMWORLD. That assignment most likely had to do with his earlier experience in covert Cuban operations as well as his prior service as a case officer for Rafael Quintero (AMJAVA-4), a participant in the very early covert maritime missions into Cuba.
AMWORLD continued as an active CIA project following the death of JFK, however Cuba did not remain a priority for President Johnson as all attention turned towards Vietnam. The Artime project struggled on, only to be quietly closed down by 1965. Following his AMWORLD assignment, Jenkins was assigned as a senior advisor to the Dominican National Police and following that as Senior Advisor on Security and Training to the national police of Nicaragua. In 1969 he moved to Laos, becoming Chief of Base for CIA military operations in southern Laos during 1971-73 (a position earlier held by David Morales, former Operations officer for the JMWAVE station in Miami). Jenkins retired at the end of the SE Asian conflict, although he was called back for special duties as late as 1979.
Rafael Quintero
Rafael Quintero was the second individual named by Gene Wheaton as having knowledge of the individuals involved on the attack on President Kennedy.
Quintero had been involved with infiltration missions into Cuba prior to the failed landing of the Cuban Expeditionary Force and had operated covertly on the island, as had Felix Rodriquez. He had managed to evade and escape capture during the landings and the following massive round up of suspected insurgents, as had Rodriquez. Following his return to the United States, he had drafted plans for a new covert operations initiative and presented them to Special Group leaders Robert Kennedy and Maxwell Taylor, who in turn offered the plans to CIA Deputy Director Richard Helms.
Quintero was well respected, both within the CIA community and by senior members of the Kennedy Administration who thought highly of him. Helms was favorably impressed and forwarded Quintero's plans on to the president's military representatives. [ xxi ] As the Artime project evolved into AMWORLD, Quintero was appointed second in command of the new project and accompanied Artime to the most secret meetings - with Carl Jenkins continuing as his case officer, as he had been during the early 60/61 JMATE project.
Quintero was involved in AMWORLD military operations through 1965. It appears that given his experience with autonomous operations and deniable military logistics, he was then retained as a contract employee working with a variety of companies in Mexico and Central America that functioned as CIA fronts. He officially separated from the CIA in 1971, but still maintained contact with his former associates. In 1976 he was approached by former CIA officer Ed Wilson, and personally loaned Wilson ten thousand dollars to help set up a new freight forwarding company. Shortly afterwards Wilson approached Quintero to take part in an assassination; Quintero assumed it was CIA sanctioned and he and an experienced Cuban exile demolitions expert flew to London to be briefed on the mission.
During the briefing it became clear that Wilson was involved with a strictly private project and that Russians were involved. The project was actually one of the Gadhafi/Libyan deals that Wilson and other Americans had become involved with, and Quintero immediately returned to the U.S. and reported it to his longtime friend, Carl Jenkins. Jenkins advised him to have nothing to do with Wilson.
By 1985 Quintero was in a new position, as field logistics coordinator for the Reagan Administration Contra initiative against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. He traveled across Central America, arranging shipping and weapons clearances with multiple governments - working directly for Richard Secord (under Oliver North). With no official US government clearances or standing, Quintero established senior level government arrangements with foreign governments and military agencies. Quintero supported Secord in establishing airfields and setting up a covert air operation in support of the Contra effort - all after Congress had passed legislation officially removing the CIA from Contra military activities.
At the same time, another long time CIA asset - Felix Rodriquez - had also been brought into the North era Contra operation.
Felix Rodriquez
Rodriquez (possible crypt AMJOKE-1) was deeply involved in the pre-invasion maritime missions into Cuba, as well as in plans for an abortive sniper attack on Castro. On key missions he traveled via the Tejana III, operated by Alberto Fernandez (AMDENIM-1)
He became one of the earliest recruits for the AMWORLD project, personally approached by both Artime and Quintero while in U.S. Army training at Fort Benning in the early fall of 1963.
Rodriquez was among the Artime recruits "black exfiltrated" out of the U.S. at the end of 1963. His role in the project, other than in radio communications coordination, is undocumented. Following the end of AMWORLD, Felix Rodriquez was retained by the CIA as a totally deniable field agent. In his own biography he describes being paid as a principal agent, but only under a verbal agreement with no contract and no paperwork. Following a short assignment to Venezuela, Felix Rodriquez, along with two other Cuban exiles, was moved into a project in Bolivia - a project specifically targeting Che Guevara. Operating under commercial cover, Rodriquez became a key figure in the operation which ultimately led to Guevara's death.
Afterwards Rodriquez continued activities across Latin America, conducting counter insurgency training under the cover of being an American military officer. Following that service, he was moved to SE Asia, where he supported Project Phoenix field operations out of Saigon; after Vietnam he was redirected back to Latin America, to a post in Argentina in 1972.
While working as an "off the books" CIA employee, Rodriquez had also pursued other work - serving as a security consultant in Lebanon and then joining Ed Wilson (as Quintero did) for work supplying weapons to militias in that country. He writes of "hoaxing" his CIA case officer to go overseas for that work. His activities across Latin America introduced him to a host of senior military officers in the region. He officially separated from the CIA in 1976 and received a virtually unique approval to publicly talk and write about his CIA employment. By 1981/82 he became involved in a number of private initiatives against the Sandinista leadership in Nicaragua, implementing what he called his own "tactical task force" of experienced anti-Castro Cuban exile fighters.
Ultimately Rodriquez, like Quintero, became deeply involved with the North/Secord Contra operations, organizing and managing transportation and supply logistics for the effort. It was during this involvement that Quintero became reacquainted with Carl Jenkins and in which Jenkins went to work for Gene Wheaton, seeking air transportation contracts to support the North/Secord Contra effort.
Nestor "Tony" Izquierdo
Izquierdo was one of the early volunteers for the Cuba Project, having been among the first to join in the movement against the Castro regime inside Cuba, along with Artime, Quintero and Tony Varona. Along with Quintero and Felix Rodriquez he took initial training in Panama under Carl Jenkins, reportedly parachuting into Cuba prior to the Bay of Pigs landings. Following the disaster at the Bay of Pigs, Izquierdo managed to make his way out of Cuba and joined CIA JMWAVE maritime missions against Cuba, missions often personally led by Rip Robertson.
Izuierdo became one of Artime's early recruits for the AMWORLD project. Both Robertsion and Artime clearly had a good deal of respect for Izquierdo's operational skills. Robertson recruited him out of AMWORLD for a special hostage rescue mission into the Congo in the fall of 1964.
Ultimately Izquierdo ended up being one of the last AMWORLD recruits to leave Nicaragua as that project was being closed down. He and Silvano Pozo Carriles helped secure the cache of AMWORLD armaments at Monkey Point in Nicaragua. In June 1965 Carl Jenkins managed to obtain work for both men in Panama, in jobs under George Cabot Lodge, son of Henry Cabot Lodge.
Upon his return to the United States, Izquierdo became involved with some of the most activist Cuban exile groups, joining CORU along with Rolando Otero, Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles. Izquierdo was also one of the first Cuban exile volunteers to train Contra rebels to fight against the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. He was killed in 1979 during an air mission into Nicaragua.
Appendix B: Artime and AMWORLD
The plans to put Artime into Cuba in February/March of 1961 - to encourage on-island resistance activities and possibly to help generate a general uprising after the assassination of Fidel Castro which never came to pass. Instead he rejoined the expeditionary force and Brigade 2506 in Guatemala and became the senior exile political leader to actually go into the fight with the Cuban brigade. Along with many of them, he was captured and spend 20 months in a Cuban prison during 1961/62.
In late 1962 Artime was released from Cuban captivity along with the remaining prisoners from Brigade 2506 and he initiated a new contact with the CIA through JMWAVE operations chief David Morales - as well as direct personal contacts with Robert Kennedy. David Morales had been Artime's case officer in Cuba during Morales' assignment there. Morales (alias Dr. Gonzalez) had posed as a priest in contacts with Artime, then in hiding for his opposition to Castro. Morales had assisted in Artime's exfiltration.
In January, 1963 William Harvey, acting head of Task Force W (which was still supporting the second-generation anti-Castro Mongoose project) recommended Artime for use by the CIA, initially for propaganda purposes. Artime also continued to meet directly with RFK from February-April, 1963. There were May meetings between Theodore Shackley, head of JMWAVE (pseudonym Andrew K. Reuteman), David Morales (pseudonym Stanley R. Zamka), Henry Hecksher (pseudonym Nelson L. Raynock) and Artime (crypt AMBIDDY-1; alias Ignacio).
While we know a good deal about the logistics, funding and even the purchasing activities of Artime's new project, we have very limited details on the activities of his personnel, especially during the fall of 1963. Given that the role of the CIA officers assigned to AMWORLD was vastly different from previous CIA covert operations, this is understandable. Hecksher, Jenkins and the small logistics staff functioned as advisors and coordinators rather than directly in either personal activities or actual military operations. Their role was to support financing, shipping and the purchasing activities that required supporting what was to appear as a totally independent and autonomous military initiative against Castro. A variety of commercial and civilian covers were required, not just for personnel but for major buys of deniable weapons from commercial arms dealers. Ships and barges of various types had to be bought or leased, transit papers arranged, and most importantly off-shore bank accounts established. And in addition to offshore accounts, deniable shell accounts were established inside the United States.
Those accounts were run by Sixto Mesa, a close personal friend of Artime's from the days of anti-Castro activities in Cuba. It appears that multiple "working accounts" (including accounts at the First National Bank of Miami) were established inside the U.S., each constantly funded at the level of $25,000. Those accounts were used for domestic travel and lodging, recruiting, maintaining communications channels such as letter drops and generally funding activities including the purchase of materials available in the United States. Over the period of its life, the overall AMWORLD project as a whole was provided with some $7,000,000.
It also seems important to note that Artime's official cover story for the AMWORLD operation - vital to distance it from the CIA, the United States and the Kennedy administration - was that it was a totally independent movement, funded by President Somoza of Nicaragua and with European donors. Artime is quoted telling potential recruits at Fort Benning that the U.S. government was not going to do anything more against Cuba, they had become an obstacle and he intended to obtain bases and support totally outside the U.S. The people Artime was recruiting were essentially being told the public story that the exiles had been abandoned in their fight against the Castro regime.
Initial organizational moves in the new project began in June 1963 and by July/August the first funding and recruiting for AMWORLD was in progress. By the end of June, matters had proceeded to the point where Artime's close friend Frank Fiorini (Sturgis) was dispatched to Dallas by Artime to investigate a source for transport aircraft to be used in project operations. While most of Artime's military operations were intended to be seaborne raids, transport aircraft would be required, and records show that at least one C-47 transport was obtained for AMWORLD use. Major covert financial funding for AMWORLD began in July, 1963.
AMWORLD did not actually become operational until early in 1964. The first ship to be used in its maritime operations was the Joanne, which spent some months fitting out in Baltimore and only at the end of November was ready to sail. A special, unidentified combat team (designated "Black Nine") was secretly placed in prepared storage areas in the ship's hold - supplied with communications equipment, generators, weapons (including silenced weapons), ammunition and other combat equipment. This was the first "black exfiltration" of an Artime combat team and it did not actually depart Baltimore until December 10, 1963.
On the evening of November 22, 1963, (as of 8:30 pm) - when the entire nation was focused on the assassination of President Kennedy - documents show that David Morales was responding to a priority message from the CIA Director related to a month's earlier message in regard to specifications for a boat which JMWAVE might be interested in purchasing. Morales' reply indicated he had not been interested at the time, could not find the specifications related to the boat and referred the Director back to the original sender of the message.
It would be some months into 1964 before any actual AMWORLD operations bases at Monkey Point, Nicaragua and at Puerto Cabezas in Costa Rica were prepared and available to begin maritime operations. The first actual mission took place in May, 1964 - largely destroying a Cuban sugar mill in Oriente Province. Overall, the AMWORLD project proved to be an extremely costly effort, funded at $225,000 each month. Much research has been done into its activities during 1964/65 by Gary Murr, and readers of Shadow Warfare (Larry Hancock) will find Murr's work and other details of the project in Chapter 12, "Autonomous and Deniable".
Most recently, documents have revealed that two additional CIA officers were assigned to the project in its early months of actual operation. Manny Chavez, pseudonym Russell Sambora and alias Manuel Gomez (Major Gomez) aka "the Mexican" was assigned from JMWAVE to support the AMWORLD effort on October 29, 1963. Chavez had been at JMWAVE with Morales on the Cuba project since 1960. He and Morales had previously served in Venezuela together before assignment to the JMATE project. Chavez had trained as a pilot and flew during World War II.
During the Korean conflict Chavez was called back to active duty and received training at the U.S. Army Counterintelligence School. He subsequently served as an air attache in 10 countries: Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Peru, Bolivia, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic and Haiti. He served as military attache to the Guatemalan government during the Arbenz regime and was apparently involved in the ouster of Arbenz in a coup orchestrated by CIA officers including David Morales and Rip Robertson. Later he was detailed to the CIA. He officially left the Air Force as a Lt. Colonel.
In later years, Chavez talked of his service as an intelligence officer attached to the American Embassy in Venezuela during 1957-1959, serving with David Morales during Morales's CIA assignment to Venezuela. The two men worked in Miami from 1960-1964, actually sharing desks for some four months in 1961 before JMWAVE moved into a larger facility. Apparently due to his liaison work in logistics for covert CIA activities, Chavez and General Ed Lansdale were close. Chavez later found out that Lansdale was his "godfather" in the Pentagon.
Chavez traveled to help organize activities in the early days of the AMWORLD project, including travel to Mexico City, arriving there on or around November 25. He was to meet David Phillips in Mexico City on December 9, 1963, however he was also scheduled to meet with Mexican Air Force officers.
We also know that one of Chavez's duties in support of AMWORLD involved assistance in coordinating the transfer of weapons purchased in Europe from Interarmco.
Chavez/Sambora was also expected to report back to CIA on the security, effectiveness and leadership involved in AMWORLD operations. His reports show a definite lack of satisfaction as time passed with the project. Apparently that opinion was shared by David Morales of JMWAVE who also continued to meet with Artime and deal with his personnel issues under the pseudonym Dr. Gonzales into 1964.
Ultimately Chavez became highly critical of the AMWORLD operation, of Artime, and of the total lack of operational security which was essentially defeating all its on-island military efforts.
In addition to Colonel Chavez, another experienced CIA officer was also assigned to the AMWORLD project. Colonel Napoleon Valeriano (pseudnym Vallejo) had a long history with the CIA including paramilitary activities and more importantly, covert actions supporting psychological warfare. He had served as one of Edward Lansdale's action officers in the Philippines, conducted Cuba project training under Carl Jenkins in Panama and Guatemala and at the end of 1963 was assigned as a propaganda and psychological warfare officer in support of the AMWORLD project.
We have a documented record of what Valeriano (referred as "the Filipino" in AMWORLD reports) did in regard to training for the Cuban Expeditionary Force prior to the landings in Cuba, however we know virtually nothing about his actual work for AMWORLD in 1964.
In the Philippines Valeriano had supported the CIA's dirty tricks operation and Valeriano himself is quoted as stating that "These ranged from 'one-shotters' designed to destroy the credibility of a notorious opponent . . . to sustained operations designed to create distrust or enmity between the Huk and the mass base." Some later became standard practices in the repertoire of American counterinsurgency. Bohannan and Valeriano describe many of them in some detail, including the dissemination of cartridges "loaded with dynamite," designed to blow up the weapon and the person holding it when fired."
We do know from Quintero's initial proposals and his ongoing involvement with planning that the AMWORLD project was to include both assassinations and a combination of terror attacks on the Castro regime infrastructure. Given Valeriano's experience in the Philippines and his expertise in such activities, it seems likely that if the Artime project had fully developed we would have seen similar tactics inside Cuba. Tactics which would have been both deniable and extremely "dirty".
Appendix C: Coming together in Louisiana
The FBI summary report on the LaCombe/Cuba bombing plan states that Carlos Hernandez Sanchez, Acelo Pedroso and two others (possibly including Soto) went to New Orleans together. They met Victor Espinosa Hernandez there and he led them to where the dynamite and bomb casings were stored. The bomb casings were for training/practice bombs, designed to hold sand as filler.
Pedroso did tell the FBI he had seen two planes, which he believed to be B-26's not B-25's. The FBI report states it failed to locate any such aircraft. Their report also notes that the trailer on the McClaney property did indeed contain the equipment needed to make live bombs. July 19 FBI research/searches suggested the only location fitting Pedroso's description of an air field which might have been used for the B-26's was a municipal airport at Houma, La.
That location and other airfields were checked for aircraft with no success. On July 20 Acelo Pedroso also told the FBI that he had been told the bombing effort was a DRE project. In further conversation he stated the aircraft were not based near New Orleans but were located further away, perhaps in Houston. He had been told they would be flown in and loaded for the attack only when the bombs were ready. The planes would not remain on the Louisiana airfield for more than four or five hours before departing on the mission. (Note: Pedroso had a CIA POA and was sent to the Congo in 1964. He was a trusted and vetted weapons specialist, working with B-26's during the CIA Mikasi air operations there.)
Soto later told one of the Fort Benning trainees being recruited for AMWORLD that the dynamite found at LaCombe was unsuitable for the bomb casings. That source also said that Soto had been a pilot in the Cuban Air Force and had entered a U.S. Air Force training program, becoming a 2nd Lt. The Air Force did train a number of Cuban exile volunteers at Sheppard Air Force Base in Texas. Soto ultimately resigned to join operational activities against Cuba.
The FBI phone record search suggested that Miguel Alvarez Jimenz was coordinating purchases and logistics for the LaCombe/Cuba plan - working for Sam Benton and Mike McClaney. Alvarez had previously been associated with Batistianos Col. Orlando Piedra and Col. Angel Sanchez.
Time line of the LaCombe / Cuba bombing project:
June 20 - 24 practice bombs shipped to Miami.
July 7? - U-Haul rented in Chicago by Victor Espinosa Hernandez driving a Chevy station wagon with Florida license 7E868 63, registered to Mears Livery Corp.
July 11 - Victor Espinosa Hernandez, residence listed as New York, rented Avis car in St Louis at the airport branch, 63 Chevy station wagon has Florida license 7E868 Car to be checked back in to Avis in New Orleans.
July 13 - Carlos Hernandez takes sick leave from his employer.
July 13 - Rental car taken out, green Chevy station wagon; car rented by John Koch Gene for Carlos Hernandez Sanchez (Batea).
July 14 - Rental car with Carlos, Soto and Acelo Pedroso leaves for New Orleans; Soto wants bombs to be examined as he plans to fly one of the aircraft. They meet Victor Espinosa Hernandez upon arrival and he leads them to the U-Haul.
Upon examining the material in the trailer Acelo advised Carlos and Soto the material in the trailer was totally unsuitable for an actual live bombing mission.
July 17 - Rental car from St Louis turned in at New Orleans with 1,138 rental miles.
July 17 - Acelo Pedrosa returns to Miami from airfield in Louisiana.
July 18 - MM-T1 report to FBI with his info.
July 19 - FBI researches and unsuccessfully searches airfields near Houma for B-25 (four engine) aircraft based on initial Miami informant report.
July 19 - Customs officer observes Victor and Carlos Hernandez with others in Miami in green rental station wagon.
July 19 - FBI conducts first interview with Acelo.
July 20 - FBI searches for air strips in general area described by Acelo but still has not located McClaney farm or trailer.
July 20 - Rental car returned July 20.
July 21 - Carlos Hernandez returns from sick leave on 21 or 22, unclear.
July 24 - FBI still searching unsuccessfully for location described by Acelo.
July 26 - FBI locates LaCombe house with U Haul behind it.
July 29 - T-1 confidential source associates house with Mike McClaney; FBI surveillance begins.
July 30 - McClaney identified and profiled in New Orleans; Acelo confirms house identification.
July 30 - Warrant issued.
July 31 - U Haul seized, 24 cases of "stick" dynamite plus bomb parts and explosives.
.....the FBI report contains no mention of Soto or of the actual arrest of Soto or Miguel Alvarez
Appendix D: Operational Associations
Cuba Project / Panama Training Camp: Under Carl Jenkins (prescreened by the CIA at Useppa Island, off Fort Meyers Florida) - Felix Rodriquez, Segundo Borges Ranzola, Nestor "Tony" Izquierdo, Victor Espinosa Hernandez, Jorge Navarro, John Koch Gene, and Carlos Hernandez
Cuba Project / Pre-Bay of Pigs Maritime Missions: Into Cuba from the Florida Keys - Felix Rodriquez, Segundo Borges, Nestor Tony Izquierdo, John Koch Gene, Jorge Navarro, Jorge Giraud, Luis Sierra, Michael Alvarez
Cuba Project / Artime's commando team: Requested for operations before and during the Bay of Pigs landings but unavailable due to ongoing maritime operations into Cuba: Carlos Hernandez, Victor Hernandez and John Koch Gene (AMHINT-26) as well as Frank Bernardino, Antonio Soto and Gonzolo Herrera
Post-Bay of Pigs Maritime missions: Into Cuba from the Florida Keys - Victor Espinosa Hernandez, Nestor Izquierdo, Carlos Hernandez, John Koch Gene, Jorge Navarro, Antonio Soto
AMWORLD: Felix Rodriquez, Segundo Borges, Nestor Izquierdo, Jorge Navarro, John Koch Gene, Jorge Giraud, Ricardo Chavez, Carlos Hernandez, Luis Sierra, and Ramon Orozco
Endnotes
[ i ] Larry Hancock, Someone Would Have Talked, Appendix I, "Echoes from Dallas"
[ ii ] Bob Woodward, "IBEX Deadly Symbol of U.S. Arms Sales Problems", Washington Post, January 2, 1977, also Seymour Hersh, "Iran signs Rockwell Deal for Persian Gulf Spy Base", Seymour Hersh, June 1, 1975, also:
[ iii ] Based on information from the ARRB records, researcher Stuart Wexler eventually did locate and communicate with the staff member who had contacted Wheaton. She had no recollection of Wheaton, a telephone contact or a personal meeting or of any materials he had provided to the Board.
[ iv ] Some of Wheaton's remarks relate to the CIA Castro assassination efforts during the Cuba Project and possibly even during AMWORLD, others relate to the Kennedy assassination. All the remarks are shown to be consistent and corroborated by the research detailed in this paper.
[ v ] Larry Hancock, In Denial / Secret Wars with Air Strikes and Tanks, Chapter 7, "Hidden Measures"
[ vi ] Larry Hancock, Shadow Warfare / The History of America's Undeclared Wars, Chapter 18 "Pushing Back", Chapter 19 "The Outsiders", Chapter 21 "It Happens"
[ vii ] Quintero himself consistently confirmed his close personal friendship with Gene Wheaton, never expressing any animosity towards him.
[ viii ] Ricardo Chavez appears to have been brought into Tom Clines' various questionable activities after Clines left the CIA; Clines was not at all hesitant to contact and attempt to use Cuban exiles who had worked in JMWAVE activities. He successfully used Felix Rodriquez in at least two instances, failed to bring Rafael Quintero into an assassinations project (Carl Jenkins advised Quintero to pass) and apparently used Ricardo Chavez as a local representative in Miami for various banking transactions and in Clines' front company (API Distributors) used in a variety of questionable international sales and money laundering activities. There is no evidence that Chavez was involved in the types of Contra field logistics and transportation activities conducted by Felix Rodriquez and Luis Posada. Chavez had been with Artime's MRR organization in Cuba and was Secretary of Operations. Chavez was initially recruited as part of the AMWORLD project in October 1963 to head the maritime component. He ended commanding a Swift boat called "The Monty." "The Monty" and Chavez were later assigned to the Congo. "The Monty" was named in honor of Manuel "Monty" Guillot (AMBRONC-5). Guillot was a close friend of both Artime and Rafael Quintero.
https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=62356&relPageId=40
[ ix ] Emilio Americo Rodriguez (AMIRE-1) had been one of the principal agents of the CIA's stay behind network inside Cuba where he worked closely with Tony Sfoza, Warren Frank, David Morales and James O'Malley. His recruitment and original request for Operational Approval was initiated in May of 1960 by Nelson Raynock whose true name was Henry Hecksher. Hecksher went on to become the point man for the CIA's AMWORLD project. Emilio was exfiltrated in June 1961 along with Tony Sforza and Warren Frank. Emilio reported to David Morales at the JMWAVE station in Miami before moving on to the Foreign Intelligence branch at JMWAVE where he reported to Warren Frank. On November 9, 1967 he was at Dulles International Airport with a scheduled plane trip to Miami. He went to the First Aid station complaining of chest pains. Emilio, originally identified as David Cordova, was then transported to the Fairfax Hospital where we pronounced dead by Dr. Cassidy. Dr. Cassidy, a CIA contract employee, recognized several names in Emilio's address book. It included names and addresses of prominent CIA employees David Phillips, William Broe, Rip Robertson, Dick Helms, Hal Swenson, Jake Esterline, Desmond Fitzgerald, John Hart, John Dimmer, "Matt", probably PM Officer Charles Matt and "Moore", probably Bob Moore.
[ x ] Moore used the pseudonym of Frederick Inghurst at JMWAVE. Moore may have been involved in a plan called Operation AMHINT which was a plot to assassinate a Soviet official with silenced rifles as part of the Bay of Pigs invasion. David Phillips, Jake Esterline, and Ed Stanulus appear to have had knowledge of AMHINT.
[ xi ] During the period of December/January in 1966/1967, John Roselli (a documented participant in the CIA effort to poison Fidel Castro) reached out to a number of high level individuals in Washington DC. This was at a point in time where New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison had taken his secret investigation of the JFK assassination to Miami, in search of mysterious Cuban exiles reportedly in contact with Lee Oswald in New Orleans during the summer of 1963. Roselli used his Washington contacts, including lobbyist Irving Davidson and media figure Jack Anderson, to offer details on a conspiracy which had killed JFK. The attackers were Cuban exiles who had been trained to kill Castro but who had somehow been "turned" on JFK by Castro himself. The story was given to Earl Warren, to the FBI, the Secret Service and in the end to President Johnson himself. Roselli was interviewed by the FBI, however no deep interest was expressed in the details he was purportedly prepared to offer, and the matter was dropped with no real investigation. The response demonstrated that official Washington had no interest in reopening the JFK assassination - however it did alert the FBI and CIA to the Garrison investigation and both agencies began immediate damage control operations to protect information and block Garrison's access to FBI officers and CIA assets.
[ xii] Jorge Sotus was one of the early figures in the revolt against Batista, associated with Carlos Prio and was a founding member of MRR along with Manual Artime. As part of that effort he worked with Robert McKeown out of Houston, Texas and was ultimately charged along with McKeown for neutrality act violations. After the MRR turned against Castro, Sotus was arrested and imprisoned on the Isle of Pines. He managed to escape from Cuba in 1960 and joined the exile volunteers in the CIA's Cuba project. Because of his long association with MRR and Artime, Sotus was selected to be part of the effort to stimulate armed resistance inside Cuba, to be infiltrated to work with the MRR - and to be joined by Artime himself. Sotus was allowed to handpick a small team to infiltrate as part of that effort; the team included especially-trusted Artime supporters such as Carlos Hernandez. Ultimately that mission, and the insertion of Artime, was aborted due to increased Cuban security.
https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=1142&relPageId=687
https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=32871&relPageId=2
https://maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=34298&relPageId=2
[ xiii ] The AMWORLD infiltration team trained at Camp Guillot on the Orlich ranch located in the Sarapiqui region of Costa Rica. This camp could be reached from the landing at Tortuguero by traveling the Rio Sarapigui to Cornelio Orlich's finca (farm). This team consisted of nine men plus Borges. The team members were: Julio Yanez Pelegrin, Aramis Pinon Estrada, Armando Caballero Parodi (Brigade 2716), Miguel Penton (Brigade 2579) who was with Felix Rodriguez in Cuba before and during Bay of Pigs, Victor Herrera (Brigade 3215), Porfirio Bonet "El Nino" who was later associated with Frank Castro, Marmerto Luzarraga (Brigade 3516) and Humberto "Che". Humberto was most likely Humberto Solis Jurado (Brigade 2510). Trained with Carl Jenkins and "Gordon". Was "Gordon" Gordon Campbell per Ayers?
https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=178367&relPageId=5
Additional MRR members were training at the Starke ranch in Costa Rica before political circumstances forced both Borges team and the MRR Cubans to relocate to Nicaragua. The Starke ranch was owned by Ludwig Starke Jimenez, a Costa Rican ultra-right wing political figure. Camp Guillot was named after Manuel Guillot (AMBRONC-5). Guillot aka Octavio Barroso Gomes had gone on many infiltration missions in Cuba and was later arrested and executed by Castro. Clarence Smeryage (true name Tom Clines) was his CIA case officer.
[ xiv ] Larry Hancock, Someone Would Have Talked, Appendix D, "The Way of JMWAVE", 352-359.
[ xv ] Ibid, Appendix I, "Echoes from Dallas", 389-391.
[ xvi ] There remains a possibility that certain of the trainees may have also trained at Camp Stanley in Texas.
[ xvii ] Larry Hancock, Someone Would Have Talked, JFK Lancer Publications, 2010, Appendix E, "Student Warrior", 360-363.
[ xviiii ] https://kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/the-mystery-of-red-bird-airport
[ xix ] http://quixoticjoust.blogspot.com/2015/02/wayne-januarys-tale-about-tail-number.html
[ xx ] https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=38010&relPageId=2
https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=21116&relPageId=3
[ xxi ] RIF 145-10001-10121 and 145-1001-10122, "Operational Plan Submitted to CIA by Quintero". See these records in he Appendix I section of larry-hancock.com.
